“You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.”

“I'm not that man anymore. No one can stay that way too long. That's why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what's behind.”

“I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears.After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.”

“This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.”

“You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.”

“A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.”

“Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to make a contract with myself.”

“I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.”

“I can hardly keep track of the things I don't know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic.”

“Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.”

“On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out.”