I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of our bed, we tried every position and every angle. I explored the curves on her body and delighted in seeing the freedom of her ecstasy. Her desperate whispers and pleas. I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me too. We lay in bed with our limbs entangled, in a pacific silence that reminded me of existing on a beach just for the sake of such an existence. I couldn't imagine the world ever becoming better, and for some strange reason the thought slipped into my head that I had suddenly grown to be an old man because I could only hope to repeat, but never improve on, a night like this. I finally took her home sometime when the interstate was empty, and the bridges seemed to lead to nowhere, for they were desolate too.

Литературу он не учит. Литературу он читает. И если его точка зрения на тот или иной образ, на ту или иную книгу не совпадает с учебником, он искренне удивляется.

Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way…The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it’s happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.

most common people oft he market-place much prefer light literature to improving books. The problem is, that so many romances contain slanderous anecdotes about sovereigns and ministers or cast aspersions upon man’s wives and daughters so that they are packed with sex and violence. Even worse are those writers of the breeze-and-moonlight school, who corrupt the young with pornography and filth. As for books of the beauty-and-talented-scholar type, a thousand are written to a single pattern and none escapes bordering on indecency. They are filled with allusions to handsome, talented young men and beautiful, refined girls in history; but in order to insert a couple of his own love poems, the author invents stereotyped heroes and heroines with the inevitable low character to make trouble between them like a clown in a play, and makes even the slave girls talk pedantic nonsense. So all these novels are full of contradictions and absurdly unnatural.

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.

O sonbahar, kendimi örnek alarak, insanın bedeni cansızlaşmadan önce ölümün eşiğinden geçebileceğini öğrendim. Kanınız bedeninizde dolaşabilir ama psikolojik olarak ölüm için bütün hazırlıkları yapmış, ölümün kendisine tahammül etmişsinizdir. Çevrenizdeki her şeyi mezardan seyrediyor gibi ilgisizce izlersiniz, Kendinizi asla bir Hıristiyan olarak kabullenmemenize, zaman zaman bunun aksini düşünmenize rağmen birdenbire bakmışsınız ki herşeye rağmen sizi inciten herkesi bağışlamış, size haksızlığı dokunanlara olan öfkenizi kaybetmişsinizdir. Değiştirmek için kaygılandığınız veya üzüldüğünüz bir şey de yoktur.

Thee, my serenity, one can not bear, Seeing thee befuddled, bereaved,Dimmed like the midnight, secluded, darkened,Thee, my serenity,A window to my eyes, A window to laughter, and peace of mind,Thee, my serenity, one can not bear,Seeing thee wail, whine, cry,Like a gloomy, mourning brume,Thee, my serenity,Soared through fervor and delight,To the crown of heavens, the Almighty Myth,One can not bear, Seeing thee prostrate, razed, demure,Upon the dimmed streets, crawling, for a sight of the lune,Thee, my birdy in love, What befall to thy song, The very chant of my life, Cut short, stopped, along with all I gasp,Thee, my serenity, one can not bear,Seeing thee, caged in thy own night, Encumbered, through thy own heart,Lean on my shoulders now,My beautiful, wonderful Lily,That thee shall not fear, the sorrow of,Of being lonely, apart, not having a peer,As I promise, to my most dear,The girl to my heart, always near,Come what may, don’t age a year,That I will be, forever here,

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.

ஒரு முச்சந்தி வியாபாரிக்குத் தேவையில்லை. முழுமையாக விடுதலையடைந்த மனிதர்களுக்கும் தேவையில்லை இந்த இரண்டு எல்லைகளுக்கும் நடுவில் இருப்பவர்களுக்கு இலக்கியம் தேவை..

Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way…The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it’s happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.Philip Pullman from his Award Lecture, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Recipient 2005

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.

मेरी उम्मीद का सागर कुछ यूँ छूटा है......................................कि हर ज़र्रे-ज़र्रे ने हमको लूटा है.............................................कश्तियाँ सारी डूब गयी किनारों तक आते-आते........................होसला जो कुछ भी बचा था तूफानों में, किनारों पर आकर टूटा है

لكن سؤلاً واحداً لم يجرؤ على توجيهه إلى أخته "الفيلسوفة"، خوفا من لطمة كفّ، فخنافة مع أُخته التي لا يحب أن يخانقها، أو خوفا من شيء آخر في ذاته:هل، حين ينسحبون، سأعود كما كنت..بدون ابن عم؟!.