❝ This century, as has been pointed out many times, is the century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings. The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed, and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in the memory after separation.

❝ I wonder which is preferable – to walk around all your life swollen up with your secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word for them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin – everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone – and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?