"On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch." -- from José Saramago's 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', trans. Giovanni Pontiero
I am still a little different from other people.
I speak and act a little differently.
So I tried very, very hard to eliminate the differences, but I couldn't do it.
The more I tried, the more it hurt.
So I thought I'd always be different until the day I die.
But many nice people filled in the gap for me.
And that is how I am standing before you today.
Thank you for filling in the gap.
Thank you for not avoiding me.
And thank you very, very much for your love.
"There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening. They trashed the optician’s interior. They were many of them, they never paid their rent, and they couldn’t be evicted." -- from
Mariana Leky's What You Can See From Here, translated by Tess Lewis
"Kompromiss bedeutet: Zurückstellen dessen, was die zu Verbindenden trennt, zugunsten dessen, was sie verbindet. Jeder Tausch, jeder Vertrag ist ein Kompromiss, denn Kompromiss bedeutet: sich vertragen.“
"People have been living on earth for thousands of years, and yet they’ve still not learned to be good. How strange." - from The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith
"I like books that make you discover other books—a virtuous cycle that should never be broken." - from 'Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop' by Alba Donati (tr. Elena Pala)