“All of a sudden the idea that I existed entered your mind. You looked at me as if you loved me. You used to do that sometimes.”

“I said it again — that I was going to write the story of the affair we'd had together, the one that was still there and taking forever to die.”

“Sometimes talking to each other is as difficult as dying.”

“But I thought the deepest abysses were over towards Korea, in the archipelagos that stretch like necklaces almost to the poles. I said that for the people that went on them, those long sea voyages lasting weeks or months were the most extraordinary times of their lives. I said I'd said it before, in my books, and was still saying it, but it was all over and would never come back. Like the age of a thing or a person, that lasts a certain time and never comes back.”

“We look at them again. They're both gazing down at the floor in a repose that is staggering to see. They're living in the endless voyage of the world, of the sea. It's written on their faces, burned by the wind and the reflection of the sea.”

“Everything lapsed back into silence and immobility.”

“As always when such memories come back to me, they estrange me from you all, from you in particular. They make me feel there's a great distance between us, like the memory of reading about something I could never get over, a passage from one of my books about some part of my youth. And it seemed to me that I must leave you in order to go on writing...”

“It has a paradoxical kind of origin, in biology, but at the same time in the imagination. But it does exist, though it hasn't got a language to express itself.”

“I'm full of echoes of war and of colonial occupation.”

“I saw I can't be like the French of France after a childhood like that.”

“Our story will never really exist, never be completely written.”

“You're not writing because you know all about that tragic subject — writing, not writing, not being able to write. In your case, it's because you're a writer that you're not writing.”

“Writing means, among other things, not knowing what you're doing, being unable to judge it — there's certainly a bit of that in a writer, a blinding light. And then there's the fact that it takes up a great deal of time and calls for a lot of effort — that's an attraction too.”

“After all, the immanence of a poem, the way it entered into people's minds, was just as mysterious.”

“She was one of those who incline to believe the same poem is written everywhere, but in different forms. That there's only one poem to be sought for through every language and all civilizations.”

“In the altered parts she said that on certain winter afternoons the slanting rays of the sun were as oppressive as the sound of cathedral organs.”

“In the unaltered parts she said the wounds inflicted on us by these swords of the sun were dealt by heaven. They left no visible trace, no scar either on our flesh or in our thoughts. They neither wounded nor consoled. It was a matter of something else. Somewhere else. Far away from where we might have thought. The wounds did not herald or confirm anything that could be taught. What they did was produce a new perception, an inner difference at the heart of meaning.”

“Towards the end the writing became uncertain and hard to decipher. It said, or almost said, that the inner difference was reached through, and was in a way the mark of, supreme despair. After that the poem trailed off in a flight through the last valleys before the heights, the cold summer night, and a vision of death.”

“They don't know themselves what they're talking about. Probably everything at once.”

“The problem must have been the time they had left to live. How not to shorten it by a single day, a single hour, a single place, a single sentence.”

“... all those summers lost like blood... The Captain's heart still quaked at the memory of life...”

“Time went by around them. So much of it had already flowed by, they must have forgotten sometimes how far they'd got to.”

“It's become impossible.”

“The rays of the sun, in winter. They creep in wherever they can, through the smallest cracks in the vaulting, the little openings the builders left in the nave so that the light could enter the cathedral and reach down to the pitch-drak of its floor. In winter the sun is a bloody, yellowish mauve... I said the rays of the sun wounded like heavenly swords, piercing the heart... but without leaving any scar, any trace, except... except... I forget, and yet it was the most important thing of all. Except... But...”

“Then, after a pause, all in one breath:
“But internal difference where the meanings are.””

“I must forget you both, you and the poem.”

“I thought I'd died that day, when I was twenty-four, but I was wrong.”

“The only real poem is inevitably the one that's lost. For me, the book doesn't exist.”

“I don't know. I don't think it's possible to know everything — even I don't know everything.”

“You said, “She must feel the power within her like a kind of lost intelligence that's no use to her anymore.”
“And like some terrible flaw she acquired from outside her own life, she doesn't know when or how, or from whom or what?”
“Some flaw deep inside her that she's kept silent about all her life, so as to stay where she wanted to be — in the barren regions of her love for the Captain.””

“It was impossible to pierce the silence that separated them from other people.”

“She hesitated a moment, then told him she'd lost confidence in herself. She said she made mistakes sometimes while she was writing, got carried away into dangerous regions into which she ought never to have gone. So she was relying on him to decide whether this had happened in the letter.”

“I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them. Unlikely as it may seem, I'm not the sort of woman who gives herself up body and soul to the love of one person, even the person who's dearest to her in the whole world. I am someone who's unfaithful. I wish I could find the words I laid aside, to tell you that. And now some of them are coming back to me. I wanted to tell you what I think, which is that one always ought to keep a place, yes that's the word, a private place, where one can be alone and love. To love one knows not what, nor whom, nor how, nor for how long. To love... now all the words are suddenly coming back... To set aside a place inside oneself to wait, you never know, to wait for a love, perhaps for a love without a person attached to it yet, but for that and only that. For love, I wanted to tell you you were what I had waited for. You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die. Don't ever answer this. And please don't hope to see me.”

“We look again at the slowly dying day.”

“It was impossible to pierce the silence that separated them from other people.”

“That's where they'd searched most thoroughly, in the Java Sea, among the curves of the Indonesian Cyclades, and then towards Pontianak and in the Natuna archipelago, on the edge of the China Sea. It was a place where people led the same irregular existence day and night.”

“It was on an Australian freighter moored at a port of call on its way to Korea that the young caretaker saw Emily L., among about twenty couples dancing on a dais on the upper deck. She was dancing with one of the ship's officers and wearing her old white and blue dress. The young caretaker didn't look to see if the Captain was there. He just looked at her. He recognized the long sunburned legs, the dawning smile arrested in a profound sweetness, her way of half-closing her eyes and remaining safe in her solitude.”

“After his awakening, Emily L. was dead for him for over a year. He had lost their story. Lost her eyes, her voice, her closed eyes against his mouth, then her lips against his, and her hands; but especially her closed eyes. Emily L.'s eyes remained open and sightless for months. And then one night he awoke again and the story was there once more. It began again between them, without any possibility of evolution, as fragile now as Emily L.'s letter, and, like it, stronger than death.”

“It was strange — we could no longer tell if it was night or not.”

“As far as the eye could see the river was flowing unhindered into the sea. It was as if the waters were borne along by sleep.”

“I do remember there was a kind of tranquility stretching all over the sea and over us.”

“I said I wanted to tell you it wasn't enough to write well or badly, to create writings that are beautiful or even very beautiful, it wasn't enough any longer to produce a book that people read to satisfy a personal and not a communal appetite. And it wasn't enough to write like that either — to make people believe it was done without thought, merely by following your hand; just as it was too much to write simply with the mind on charge, supervising the activity of madness. It's not enough — philosophy and morals and ordinary examples of the human race (what about dogs, for example?) are not enough, they don't get through to the body that's reading the story and wants to know the story right from the start, and that with every reading is ignorant of more than it was ignorant of already.”

“And I said one ought to write without making corrections, not necessarily at full tilt, no, but at one's pace and in accordance with what one is experiencing at the time; one ought to eject what one writes, manhandle it almost, yes, treat it roughly, not try to trim profusion but let it be part of the whole, and not tone down anything either, whether its speed or its slowness, just leave everything as it is when it appears.”