“I like to do things that frighten me. When I’m afraid, I understand more things. I want the feeling... All my instincts cry out against it, every morning anew. Then I say, ‘I should do it. If I don’t do it, no one will do it for me.”

“I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny — arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate — I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom — maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions.”

“I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.”

“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”

“I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.”

“She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can’t fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, “Come on, try a little longer.” And so for a few bleary-eyes, sleepwalking weeks—and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning—she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from the loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement—even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced.”

“and I discovered my limitations, and mainly I learned that there was a price to pay for that childhood (it turns out there’s no such thing as a free starvation), and that in the meantime the world had filled up with other children who hadn’t wasted all their strength on just surviving but had simply grown and opened and deepened, and that only in her innocent eyes could I still be considered worth anything.”