“I will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me--always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender.”
―
―
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
―
―
“In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.”
― The Ongoing Moment: A Book About Photographs
― The Ongoing Moment: A Book About Photographs
“Dreams heed no borders, the eyes need no visas With eyes shut I walk across the line in time All the time—”
― Half a Rupee: Stories
― Half a Rupee: Stories
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