We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

“Every life is in many days, day after day,” Joyce wrote in Ulysses,

Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly.

The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.

Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.

We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa.

Things that would not have merited a second glance are now unquestioningly, almost automatically, recorded. The doors of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: cheap photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and a

An image depends radically on context, on how it is placed but also on who is looking at it.

old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.”