Javier Marías

for there was no time to explain my curiosity to her nor was she in any state to interest herself in anything outside her own body,

The day we didn’t spend together we never will have spent together, what someone was going to say to us over the phone when they called and we didn’t answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of that lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you.

our morbid attempt to prevent time from ending, to cause what is over to return, we will be letting that other time slip past us as if it were not ours.

was impatient to start listening, and for that I needed Luisa to go back to sleep, to stop being corporeal and continuous, to remove herself and become remote,

all of them united and made equal by that continuous, communal song occasionally accompanied by the whistling of young boys not yet at school and who, therefore, still participated in the world of women in which they moved: the delivery boys with their bikes and their heavy boxes, sick children in beds scattered with comics and coloured prints and storybooks, working children and idle children, whistling and envying one another.

some vain woman who didn’t want it to disappear from the earth along with her, and thus it was passed on to us, regardless of our sex.

she’d sit looking sometimes at nothing in particular and sometimes at the dead, at the faces she’d watched grow up but not grow old, three-dimensional faces that had grown flat, mobile faces that we suddenly become used to seeing only in repose, not them but their image,

about professors and flower-sellers,

Our youth is something hidden, a secret to those who never knew us when we were young.

just listened – it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he’s not yet allowed to enter, like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he’s not there and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him