Andrei

“We’re just queuing for a possibility, queuing for something, maybe queuing for nothing,” she said, smiling her sad and loving smile. “But it will pass, my dear. Even the longest queue dissolves eventually.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“This wasn’t distraction or entertainment: here was a book that seemed to have been written for me, which lifted me up into its realm and united me with something that seemed to have been there all along and that I seemed to be a part of. It felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator—despite their agony, despite their pain—healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“This is how I lived back then– through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“I don't know what woke me up tonight . . . What I am certain of is this: my body feels depleted, like a foreign country after a war. And yet I cannot go back to sleep.
I think of you.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark