Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theater and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in

I’d forgotten how terrible it is to be dependent on an unsatisfied body.

It’s amazing and unnerving how soon the frameworks that ordinarily define us and shape our encounters (while simultaneously getting in the way of them) quickly fall aside when we are alone. And when we force ourselves to recall the schemas that routinely orientate us throughout the days and nights of our lives, they seem abstract and insubstantial.

The only way a woman can experience solitude, without judgment and recrimination scuffing up against her peace, is if the rest of the world has come to a complete standstill and there is no one around to see her.

Shifting away from the popular perspective, which casts living alone as a grim state of affairs, I wanted to embrace it as a fruitful situation, which would entail, I anticipated, conceiving of the home as something other than a domestic space.

Memories, mourning and fear will remain, and hard work, as long as I live.

I still don’t know how, but I’ll definitely find a way.

I gradually started to break free of my past and find a new way of organizing things.

There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the