“I’ve lived long enough to know that faith and trust in the kindness of others is a hard-won oblivion, is a very strong armor. It may hurt, in the short run, to have an open, trusting heart. It may mean, in the short run, that you are weak. But in the long run it can mean survival.”
Fiction
Mischling
“It must have been like stringing a harp for someone who played his harp with a knife, or binding a book for someone whose idea of reading was feeding pages to a fire.”
The Vegetarian
“‘I used to be dark’: There were times when he wanted to express it this way. I used to be dark. The monochrome world, entirely devoid of the colors he was now experiencing, had had a calmness that was beautiful in its way, but it wasn’t somewhere he could go back to. It seemed the happiness that had enabled him to feel that quiet peace was now lost to him forever. And yet he found himself unable to think of this as a loss. All of his energy was taken up in trying to cope with the excitement, the heightened awareness of living in the present moment.”