People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world...

Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to...

I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don’t have to think at all. It’s like I...

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was...

I need to learn not just to forget but to forgive.

It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly : I’m the kind...

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless–a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there,...

The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but...

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly...

A cell is just a room if you don’t lock the door.

Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with.

We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m racing with my own shadow

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I’d close my eyes, and...

All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the...

Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power.

Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial.

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of...

People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream,

We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear.

True, luck may rule over parts of a person’s life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there’s a WILL– much less a strong will to swim...

It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person’s heart, a very sensual feeling.

I’ve been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.

The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.

Smrt postoji ne kao suprotnost života već kao njegov deo.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

No era mi brazo lo que ella buscaba, sino el brazo de alguien. No era mi calor lo que ella necesitaba, sino el calor de alguien. Entonces sentía algo rayando en la culpabilidad por ser...

No creas que estoy enfadada contigo. Sólo estoy triste. Por que tú has sido muy amable conmigo, y, a cambio, no he sabido ayudarte. Tú siempre estás encerrado en tu propio mundo y, cuando llamo...

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,

The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up...

I’m your phantom dance partner. I’m your shadow. I’m not anything more.

Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc...

Anyhow, I took every stitch of clothing off and got out of bed. And I got down on my knees on the floor in the white moonlight. The heat was off and the room must...

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from...

I don’t know what it means to live.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course – the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was.

Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over...

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.

It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.

The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.

Looking up at [the sky], I think about the October evening world, where ‘people’ must be going about their lives. Beneath that pale autumn light, they must be walking down streets, going to the store...

It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it…..The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.

Each “way of thinking” has its own shape and color, which wax and wane like the moon.