"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
"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)
"So that is why I found myself waiting at a station in a city whose name I could hardly pronounce, and where I did not speak a word of the local language, waiting for someone I would not recognise to take me somewhere I did not know." - from 'Who's Who When Everyone is Someone Else' by C.D. Rose
"The sentence that best expresses a snail's way of life: 'The right thing to do is to do nothing, the place to do it is in a place of concealment and the time to do it is as often as possible." - from 'The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating' by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
And music is only good if, first of all, it makes you weep, second, if it makes you die laughing, and third, if it gets your legs and arms, your bosom and rear end moving and whirls you through the room like a maniac.
--from The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil (tr. David Burnett)
"In the same way, a village on the side of a hill, seen from a train, may look like the perfect place to spend the rest of the your days, yet if you were to get out of the train and go into the village you would find that the magic had escaped from it to settle on the tail of the departing train which had so bored you as you sat in it and yearned towards the village." - from The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens