It’s better to look at the sky than live there.

The sky is better to look up at than to live in.

---002---

No matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Wherever you go, you will always meet yourself.

---003---

The mind can accept advice, but the heart cannot, and love, because it has not studied geography, knows no boundaries.

---004---

You don't know something is yours until you throw it away.

---005---

Because the older you get, the harder it is to put your thoughts into action. Perhaps for this reason, these thoughts have become a burden in your mind.

---006---

Miss Nobody, do you know what's wrong with you? You're cowardly, you don't have the courage, you're afraid to stand up and say, "Yes, that's how life is. People love each other and belong to each other because that's the only chance for real happiness." You call yourself a free soul, a "wild thing," but you're afraid that others will put you in a cage, but in fact you're already in a cage, which you built yourself, and it will always follow you whether you're in the West or the East, and no matter where you go, you're always trapped in yourself.

---007---

I don’t want to sleep, nor do I want to die. I just want to roam on the grassland at the horizon.

---008---

I was always drawn back to places I had lived in, to houses and streets, like the brownstone on East Seventy-ninth Street where I had my first apartment in New York, the year the war began.

---009---

My humanity is only enough to pity myself

---010---

Because few of us know that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not pity, as most people guess. Love happiness is not to focus all feelings on the other person, but fewer people know this. One must love many things, and the lover must only be a symbol of these things. The truly loved person is in the eyes of the lover the blooming lilac, the boats and fishing lights, the school bell, the mountains and rivers, the unforgettable conversations, friends, the children's Sundays, the disappearing voices, the favorite clothes, the autumn and all the seasons, memories, yes, memories are the soil and water on which life depends.

---011---

It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.

Honey, this may be normal, but I would rather be natural.

---012---

There was a silence moving through the house, and like most silences it was not silent at all, it knocked at the door, echoed in the clock, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to look into my face, exploded.

---013---

"So he pressed his head against the pillow and covered his ears with his hands. He thought, think about insignificant things, think about the wind."

---014---

But dear child, we are all alone, isolated from each other. Society laughs at us so much that we cannot speak or show our tenderness. Death is stronger than life for us, it blows through the darkness like the wind, laughs without joy, mocks our cries. Loneliness fills us like garbage, we burn everything, we are broken, we howl around the world, we die in our rented rooms, in shabby hotels, in the immutable home of our wandering hearts.

---015---

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.

The mind can accept advice, but the heart cannot, and love, because it has not studied geography, knows no boundaries.

---016---

Loneliness, like a fever, was worst at night, but with him there was light, light that penetrated the trees like the song of a bird.

---017---

Loneliness, like a fever, was worst at night, but with him there was light, light that pierced the trees like the poetry of birds. And when the sun rose he let go of my hand and walked away, the tearful boy, my friend.

---018---

Youth is not human at all, it cannot be human, because young people never believe that they will die...especially not that death often comes in unnatural ways.

---019---

A truly loved person is in the eyes of his lover the blooming lilacs, the fishing lights, the school bells, the landscape, the unforgettable conversations, the friends, the children's Sundays, the fading voices, the favorite clothes, the autumn and all the seasons.

---020---

The whole autumn is filled with maple leaves, as red as her red hair, the leaf stems are her hoarse voice, and the jagged leaf shape is like her face, commemorating her face.

---021---

We live in this world today.

Being cursed by some people with the most vicious language,

But when we die,

While lying in the coffin,

They always press lilies into our hands,

Why didn't you give me flowers when I was alive...

---022---

"My dear, my love for you is incomparable to any other woman, but please leave me, leave me now while our love is still shining."

---023---

Dreams are the thoughts of the mind and our secret true feelings

---024---

'But I don't think he's right for you. I know too many people like Pepe. If you must love him, then love him, but it won't work. 'The mind can accept advice, but the heart can't. And love, because it doesn't know geography, doesn't know boundaries. No matter how you tie it to the bottom of the water, it will always float to the surface. Why not? Any love that exists in human nature is natural and beautiful. Only hypocrites will ask what a person loves. Those who don't understand emotions, and those who are intoxicated with sacred beliefs, are anxious and worried about this, and often mistake the arrow pointing to heaven for the arrow pointing directly to hell.

---025---

Most of life is so dull that it is not worth mentioning. There is no time when it is not boring. Whether it is changing to a different brand of cigarettes, moving to a new place, subscribing to a different newspaper, falling in love and getting out of love, we are always fighting against the inextricable boredom of daily life in some frivolous or profound ways. Unfortunately, all mirrors are the same and always against people. No matter how you risk it, the mirror only reflects the same empty, unsatisfied face from different angles. So when she asked, "What did I do?" she really meant, "What should I do?" People usually do this.

---026---

The candle is the magic wand; light one and the world becomes a book

---027---

I will get there someday, but I want to get there with my self-respect intact. I want to wake up one morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's and still be me.

There was a quiet and noble air there, and nothing bad could happen to you among the nice men in the fine suits and the nice smell of silverware and alligator wallets.

---028---

Any love that exists in human nature is natural and beautiful. Only hypocrites would investigate what a person loves.

---029---

The sky is better to look up at than to live in.

---030---

We were like kids growing up in the same room, except I came out the front door and you went out the back door.

---031---

She seemed only intermittently aware of the present, and it was likely that the future held little meaning for her. Her consciousness was like a mirror, reflecting only the bleak space of a deserted, empty house.

---032---

My dear, few things in this world have an ending. Isn't the vast majority of life just a series of incomplete episodes?

---033---

As long as dreams are persistent, they can become reality.

---034---

Most of life is so boring that it is not worth mentioning. There is no time when it is not boring. Whether it is changing to a different brand of cigarettes, moving to a new place, subscribing to a different newspaper, falling in love and getting out of love, we are always fighting against the inextricable boredom of daily life in ways that are either frivolous or profound.

---035---

Think of nothing, think of wind.

---036---

You always make the mistake of loving wild animals. You always bring wild animals home. Once it was an eagle with a broken wing, another time it was a full-grown wild cat with a broken limb. You cannot love wild animals. The more you love them, the stronger they become; finally they have the strength to escape to the woods and fly into the trees, and then they soar into the sky!

---037---

In moments of terror or extreme tension, there are moments when your entire consciousness is waiting, as if waiting for a revelation, and a sense of stillness runs through your thoughts; it is like a sleep, or a surreal trance; in this temporary pause, you become aware of a quiet rational force.

---038---

Chewing eucalyptus leaves to rid her breath of the alcohol, she felt the chill of twilight stirring the air around her. The daytime moon had grown a deeper yellow, and the homing birds flew back into the dark leaves.

---039---

Only secure people can afford love or anger.

---040---

They will go through life at the same determined pace, paying little attention to the cliffs to their left.

---041---

We are talking about love. A leaf, a handful of seeds - start with these, little by little, to learn what love is. It starts with just a leaf, a rain, and then you learn something from the leaf, and the rain ripens something, and someone comes to receive the love you have learned from these things. You have to understand that this process is not easy; it may take a lifetime, and I have spent my lifetime like this, and I still don’t fully understand it - I only know that this is the fact: love happens in a series, just as nature is a series of lives strung together.

---042---

Suddenly, with her eyes closed, she felt an upward surge, like a diver rising from some deeper, greener depths.

---043---

Running feet and raindrops mixed together and hit the sidewalk like a xylophone-everyone was busy closing doors and windows, and then there was nothing left but silence and rain. After a while, she shuffled slowly and stood beside him under the street light, feeling that the sky was like a mirror shattered by thunder, because the rain between them was like a curtain of broken glass.

---044---

Think about insignificant things. Think about the wind.

---045---

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

Of course, imagination can open any door, and terror can creep in with just a turn of the key.

---046---

Love happens in a series, just as nature is a series of lives strung together.

---047---

People don't escape from others, they escape from themselves.

---048---

We became friends, Dolly, Catherine and I. I was eleven, then sixteen. Although I never achieved anything, those were the happiest years.

---049---

Whether it's changing to a different brand of cigarettes, moving to a new place, subscribing to a different newspaper, falling in and out of love, we are always fighting against the inescapable boredom of everyday life in ways that are either frivolous or profound.

---050---

We are all alone, isolated from each other. Death is stronger than life, it blows through the darkness like the wind, laughs without joy, mocks our cries. Loneliness fills us like garbage, we howl through the world, die in our rented rooms, in shabby hotels, in the immutable home of the wandering heart.

---051---

Through a spirit, the wizard gave her these instructions: You must catch a wild bee, he said, and hold it within your closed palms... If the wild bee does not sting you, then you will know that you have found true love.

---052---

It is this road, it is this tree: I closed my eyes and let their images fix in my heart, because I didn’t believe I would come back, I couldn’t imagine that in the future I would travel thousands of mountains and be unable to let go, until this tree haunted me and called me back.

---053---

Think about insignificant things. Think about the wind.

（think of nothing things, think of wind.）

---054---

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Failure is the spice that adds flavor to success.

---055---

People should mind their own business. The deepest part of your heart is the good part.

---056---

He went crazy in his old age, and Verena had moved him from the farm to live here, and he died here, not knowing where he was. Although he had been dead for nearly fifteen years, the old man's smell of piss and tobacco still permeated the mattress in the room and the closet, where on a shelf sat the only personal thing he had brought from the farm, a small yellow drum: when he was my age, he had marched in a Confederate regiment, beating the drum and singing along the way. Dolly said that when she was a little girl, she loved waking up to her father's singing on winter mornings, because he would walk around the house and light the stove; and then when he was old and dead, she would sometimes hear him singing in the Indian Meadows. That's the wind, Catherine said, but Dolly said to her: But we are the wind - the wind collects our voices, records them, and then carries these conversations and talks through the grass and the grass - I clearly hear my father's voice.

---057---

I like to eat candy, even if it tastes like stone.

---058---

I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm a homosexual. I'm a genius. And yet I can still be a saint.

---059---

This is a grass harp, in which so many voices gather, telling a story from memory. We listen.

---060---

He is often like this now, always a little lost, and never knows whether the next step will be forward or backward, up or down.

---061---

Being an adult again, with a sweetheart in Alaska—it was fun for an old man like me who sat alone at home listening to the ticking of the clock.

---062---

Hearing the sound of time passing makes the days seem longer. I now appreciate the length of the day.

---063---

Speaking of such a night without the moon, it doesn't matter what you say, as long as the speaker has trust and the listener has sympathy.

---064---

I confess: I think this is just a dream... But if a man doesn't dream, it's like not sweating, he will only accumulate toxic gases in his body and be unable to expel them.

---065---

He nodded absently, looking past us, above us, his acorn eyes fixed on the leaves blowing in the breeze against the sky. "Maybe none of us have a place. But we know somewhere that we can be, and if we can find it, even for a short time, we're lucky. That's probably where you are," he said, shivering slightly, as if great wings had spread out in the sky, casting a chill shadow. "That's where I am, too."

---066---

Those famous paintings of youth, woodland and water - how many times in later years, strolling through the cold rooms of the museum, I stopped before such a painting and stood for a long time, thinking about the past scene. What I saw in my imagination was not the reality of the day, a group of children covered with goose bumps, playing in the autumn stream, but as the painting depicts, strong young men and girls with diamond-like water drops wading in; I wondered then, and I still wonder now, how they came and where in the world they were going? Such an unusual family.

---067---

You'd better take a closer look: I am who I am.

---068---

Since we both don't like talking in the dark, let's talk in the open.

---069---

She was the first to discover everything, and her only real vanity was that she wanted to be the one to call out certain unique discoveries, not others: a trail of bird footprints, icicles on the eaves - she was always shouting, "Look, that cloud is shaped like a cat, there's a boat among the stars, there's a face on the frost."

---070---

I guess, to have a near-death experience like he did, I guess it changes a person - makes him more open to good things.

---071---

I have a box hidden somewhere in the attic, and I must ask Verena to give it to me, if only I could see my first love again: what's in it? A piece of dried honeycomb, an empty wasp's nest, something else, an orange with cloves in it, a bird's egg - when I love, these loves pile up in my heart and fly around me like birds in a field of sunflowers. But these things are better not to be seen by others, because they burden others and make them, I don't know why, unhappy.

---072---

"Do they think it's shameful?" Dolly said, half indignant and half annoyed. "Because you're befriending and keeping company with a lonely kid in Alaska? It snows all the time there."

---073---

I came here not on anyone's orders, but I just wanted to take a walk in the woods. The woods are the most beautiful at this time of the year.

---074---

If you cook for a man, wash his clothes, and have children with him, you are married to him and the man is yours. If you clean a house, tend the fire, and add charcoal to it, and you do all this with love for many years, you are married to the house and the house is yours.

---075---

Courtesy is more important in the morning than at any other time of the day: especially when people live in such a confined space.

---076---

"Charlie said love is a chain. I hope you listened and understood what he said. Because when you can love one thing," she held the blue egg as preciously as the judge had held the leaf, "you can love something else and you have it in your life. You can forgive everything."

---077---

You also told me that you were ashamed of me. Ashamed of Catherine. We did so much for you in the past; it was such a waste, and it was so sad to think about it. Do you understand the feeling of this waste?

I thought I would carry this pain with me until the day I died. But I won't. But I'm not proud of saying this, Verena, I'm ashamed of you, too.

---078---

I am a "horizontal" writer. I can only think when I lie down -- either in bed or on a sofa, with cigarettes and coffee within reach.

---079---

She and Catherine always had the radio on, and it was often hot enough to hatch chicks. They loved to listen to football games. When the judge tried to explain the rules of the game to her, Dolly stopped him and said, "Please don't. I like to keep it a secret. Everybody's shouting and having so much fun: if I knew what it was all about, I wouldn't find it so noisy and so fun." At first the judge was angry because he couldn't convince Dolly to support either team. She thought both sides should win the game: "They're very nice guys, I'm sure of it."

---080---

Did you hear that? That's the grass harp, always telling stories - it knows the stories of everyone on the mountain, everyone who ever lived, and when we die, it will tell our stories, too.

---081---

We are the wind——

The wind collected our voices, recorded them, and carried the sounds of our conversations through the blades of grass and the meadows...

---082---

As usual, Dolly was in no hurry. Her habit, even when it was raining, was to walk slowly along the common paths, as if she were walking in a garden, with a keen eye for all the rare flowers and precious herbs, picking a sprig of young mint, sweet rue, rosemary, etc., and using the fragrance to perfuming her clothes. She was the first to discover everything, and her only real vanity was that she wanted to be the one to shout out some unique discovery, not others: a set of bird footprints, icicles under the eaves - she was always shouting, look, that cloud is in the shape of a cat, there is a boat in the stars, there is a face in the frost. We walked slowly through the grass, and Dolly picked up a bag full of withered dandelions and a pheasant feather: I think the sun will set when we reach the road.

---083---

Did I have a choice? That's what I want, a choice. To know that I could have lived a different life, a life that was determined by me. That would give me peace of mind, really.

---084---

When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.

Whether it's changing to a different brand of cigarettes, moving to a new place, subscribing to a different newspaper, falling in and out of love, we are always fighting against the inescapable boredom of everyday life in ways that are either frivolous or profound.

---085---

The wind and rain before the hurricane

---086---

Nowadays, being alone for too long is unbearable, a whole life of loneliness.