“it is the West’s provincialism, which leads it to perceive the rest of the continent as a failed copy of itself”

“It drew us, because life is made of bits of the present that stay in the mind. The world itself, really, is made of that.”

“it gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there?”

“The future is fiction. It will come, of course, we hear about it all the time, but the old wisdom knows that only what is, and what was, exists. The rest does not, because no one ever saw it or touched it.”

“Sometimes I get up before sunrise to watch the way the dark thins out and objects slowly reveal themselves, the trees, the rest of the landscape. You can hear the river below and roosters in the village. The light of dawn, cold and blue, gradually fills the world, and it's the same in every place I've been.”

“Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all.”

“In the slanting light of late autumn, the gestures and bodies of people are more expressive the less meaning they have. Men stand on street corners staring at the emptiness of the day. They spit on the sidewalk and smoke cigarettes. That's the present. ...Time, approaching from afar, is like the air that someone else has already breathed.”