Paolo Giordano

“Por primera vez sintió que la inmensa distancia que los separaba era insignificante. Estaba convencida de que él seguía en el mismo sitio, donde ya le había escrito algunas veces, muchos años antes. Porque estaban unidos por un hilo invisible, oculto entre mil cosas de poca importancia, que sólo podía existir entre dos personas como ellos: dos soledades que se reconocían.”

“Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them.”

“Sex is one of the situations where all things submerged in our subconscious come out, all fears, all desires, all the violence, and all the needs. That's why sex, in my opinion, is never as easy as television shows or jokes present it to be. We are often told that taking pleasure, especially from sex, and surrendering to it are things that happen naturally, gestures that come for free. I find it harder, instead, to learn how to surrender than to learn how to resist. That's exactly what my characters suffer from: the difficulty of covering the distance between desires and their fulfillments, the difficulty of doing "easy" things, such as kissing a girl or lying in bed with her, difficulties that are not only due to external causes, but also often to internal ones.”

“Cerró los ojos y en los labios sintió sus labios calientes, y en las mejillas sus lágrimas, que quizá no eran suyas, y en la cabeza sus manos ligeras, sujetándosela y conteniendo los pensamientos, confinándolos en el espacio que ya no existía entre ellos.”

“Hij deed zijn mond open om te antwoorden dat je speciaal voelen de ergste kooi is die je om je heen kunt bouwen, maar hij zei niets.”

“Ze verlangde hartgrondig naar de onbevangenheid van haar leeftijdsgenoten, hun dwaze gevoel van onsterfelijkheid.”

“L'esplosione che non senti è quella che ti ha già ammazzato.”

“Perché ha sempre voglia di troppe cose e sempre di quelle che non può avere, di quelle passate o, peggio ancora, di quelle che non arriveranno mai? È una condanna, la sua? A vent'anni comincia a desiderare che tutte quelle voglie spariscano senza lasciare traccia. Deve pur giungere il momento in cui un uomo smette di essere diviso a metà, in cui un uomo si trova esattamente dove vuole stare.”

“Porque estaban unidos por un hilo invisible, oculto entre mil cosas de poca importancia, que sólo podía existir entre dos personas como ellos: dos soledades que se reconocían.”

“Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.”

“...finally her hands, so light, holding his head still and catching all his thoughts and imprisoning them there, in the space that no longer existed between them.”

“Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.”

“By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains. It had happened with Michela and then with Alice and again now. He recognized them this time: those seconds were there, and he would never make a mistake again.”

“It was another of the things he had left behind, another obvious step in a boy's life that he had decided not to take, so as to stay as far as possible from the machinery of life.”

“this meant he had reached the end of the track that he had blindly followed from the first year of primary school to graduation.”

“In the end it happens, in some way you couldn't imagine before.”

“إن شعور المرء بكونه مميزا هو أسوأ أنواع الأقفاص التى يمكن للمرء أن يبنيه.”

“Cuando estaba con ella sentía que valía la pena hacer todas esas cosas normales que hacen las personas normales.Mattia pensó que nada bueno había en tener una cabeza como la suya, que con ganas se la habría arrancado y sustituido por otra, incluso por una caja de galletas siempre que estuviera vacía y fuera ligera. Quiso contestar que sentirse especial era una jaula, lo peor que podía pasarle a uno, pero se abstuvo.Estaban unidos por un hilo invisible, oculto entre mil cosas de poca importancia, que sólo podía existir entre dos personas como ellos: dos soledades que se reconocían.No lo había elegido entre nadie; no había pensado en nadie más.”

“Numbers are everywhere," said Denis. "They're always the same, aren't they?""Yes.""But Alice is only here.""Yes.""So you've already made up your mind.”

“If we couldn't see anything outside the car, if we didn't know we were moving, there would be no way of telling whether it was the raindrops' fault or our own.”

“Alleen en verloren, vlak bij elkaar, maar niet dicht genoeg om elkaar echt te raken.”

“Ci si può ammalare anche solo di un ricordo, e lei era ammalata.”

“She remembered lying in the crevasse, buried by snow. She thought of that perfect silence. Also now, like then, no one knew where she was. This time too, no one would come. But she no longer expected them to. She smiled at the clear sky. With a little effort, she could get up by herself.”

“When she opened her eyes the sky was still there, with its monotonous and brilliant blue. Not a cloud passed across it.”

“Separating them were two layers of brick, a few inches of plaster, and nine years of silence.”

“No, what she had in front of her was a grown-up person who had built a life around a terrifying abyss, on terrain that had already collapsed, and yet who had succeeded, far away from here, among people Alice didn't know.”

“We drove around for half an hour in search of two free parking spaces because you couldn't get into a single one," he said, to banish those thoughts. "It was just an excuse to keep you with me," Alice replied. "But you never understood anything.”

“she and Mattia were united by an invisible, elastic thread, buried under a pile of meaningless things, a thread that could exist only between two people like themselves: two people who had acknowledged their own solitude within the other.”

“Perhaps the old lady had kidnapped Michela, had found her in the park and taken her away, because she had a violent desire for a little girl but couldn't have children. Her womb was defective or else she was unwilling to make a bit of room in it. Just like me, thought Alice.”

“Mattia was startled to find that he still had instincts, buried beneath the dense network of thoughts and abstractions that had woven itself around him.”

“The scene was set. All that was required was an action, a cold start, instant and brutal as beginnings always are.”

“Why did you choose to stay here?" (...)"I don't know," he said. "It's as if there's more oxygen here.”

“The whole house, its very walls, was impregnated with a smell of vitality that he was unused to. He thought about his own apartment, where it was so easy to decide simply not to exist.”

“It was strange to find them here, still alive, with their shared bits of past that suddenly counted for nothing.”

“As a little girl she had liked looking at her palms against the light, the red peeking through her closed fingers. Once she had shown it to her father and he had kissed her fingertips, pretending to eat them.”

“She found herself thinking of how it would feel to be safely trapped in his arms, with no more possibility to choose.”

“From the stereo came music that Alice didn't recognize, but it wasn't there to be listened to, just to complete a perfect scenario; there was nothing casual about it.”

“but his eyes were too dark for her to make out any spark in them”

“That evening, getting up from the table, she had crossed the invisible boundary beyond which things start working by themselves.”

“He collected the stories of people like himself, mostly keeping silent and listening. He slowly discovered that the stories were similar, that there was a process, and that the process involved immersion, putting your whole head under until you touched the bottom and only then coming up for air.”

“Mattia thought there was nothing good about having his mind. That he would happily have unscrewed it and replaced it with a different one, or even with a package of biscotti, provided it was empty and light. He opened his mouth to reply that feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build for himself, but he didn't say anything.”

“Even though he was afraid to admit it, when he was with her it seemed it was worth doing all those normal things that normal people do.”

“She was sleeping a sleep that wasn't her own and the gadgets to which she was connected didn't make a sound.”

“With photography Alice liked the actions more than the results. She liked opening the back of the camera and unrolling the new film a couple of inches, just enough to catch it in the runner, and thinking that this empty film would soon become something and not knowing what, taking the first few snaps into the void, aiming, focusing, checking her balance, deciding whether to include or exclude pieces of reality as she saw fit, enlarging, distorting.”

“His wife was disappearing from life like a wet mark drying on a shirt.”

“He was dressed anonymously and had the posture of someone who doesn't know how to occupy the space of his own body.”

“Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you're about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered.”

“Mattia stayed right where he was, feeling those clothes that weren't his, but with the pleasant sensation of disappearing into them.”

“as if moved by a breeze that only she could feel.”

“For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn't make all that much difference. They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation.”