Erri De Luca Quotes

I see the pain of miserly love in young people,' I say. 'You don't have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I'm careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It's not like dancing. It's like a stone walkway with a little grass between the cracks. It's strong but I will try to tread carefully and not ruin it. In Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you.

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf.

This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.

You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.

A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.

Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to make a contract with myself.

I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.

I'm not that man anymore. No one can stay that way too long. That's why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what's behind.