embers

Do, for Gods sake, in memory of old times … write to me. Write fully, about everything.”

 

“Here we sit in dark tunnels, tapping on the wall – That's friendship – that's communication.”

Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.”

I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘How do you do?’ — they’re really saying I love you.”

Erst im Individuum erhält die Sprache ihre letzte Bestimmtheit. Keiner denkt bei dem Wort gerade und genau das, was der andre, und die noch so kleine Verschiedenheit zittert, wie ein Kreis im Wasser, durch die ganze Sprache fort. Alles Verstehen ist daher immer zugleich ein Nicht-Verstehen, alle Uebereinstimmung in Gedanken und Gefühlen zugleich ein Auseinandergehen. In der Art, wie sich die Sprache in jedem Individuum modificiert, offenbart sich, ihrer im Vorigen dargestellten Macht gegenüber, eine Gewalt des Menschen über sie."

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

She realized that although Mr. Valmik depicted life as a sequence of accidents, there was nothing accidental about his expert narration. His sentences poured out like perfect seams, holding the garment of his story together without calling attention to the stitches. Was he aware of ordering the events for her? Perhaps not – perhaps the very act of telling created a natural design. Perhaps it was a knack that humans had, for cleaning up their untidy existences – a hidden survival weapon, like antibodies in the bloodstream."

Dina Dalal seldom indulged in looking back at her life with regret or bitterness, or questioning why things had turned out the way they had, cheating her of the bright future everyone had predicted for her when she was in school, when her name was still Dina Shroff. And if she did sink into one of these rare moods, she quickly swam out of it."