Status Updates From On the Calculation of Volum...

"A friend doesn’t just disappear. You can argue with your friends, but you can’t let them disappear."

"Maybe women are just alone at the exact moment they set themselves in motion. No one there to take a picture, to tell the story. Maybe they are too rare to be captured by a photographer. Or maybe the photographer was looking the other way. Maybe they are foreign bodies."

"There was so little language left in me that I had to borrow some of hers. I could hear it echo in my head. It felt as ifI needed help to get started, to find my way back. Her sentences bled into mine, and I could feel the words gradually coming back to life, the sentences began to take shape again, my own sentences too—or ones resembling those I used to say."

"I look around, and there’s always something to discover. It never ends. You pluck and pluck and just around the bend there’s more. Nature’s bounty spills into the streets. There is enough for everyone and nothing is taken from anyone."

"I long and I let go. I think of all that exists, everyone I know, everything I’ve seen, people and things that are out there somewhere. I think of places I could visit, of things I could see if I wanted to. It’s not gone. I’ve simply let go for a while."

"Maybe our world was just one in a long line of worlds that dissolve and disappear, all of a sudden or bit by bit, societies that are attacked from within or from without, or which dissolve or intertwine with others, and sooner or later something is gone, and something else has arisen, territories acquire new names, houses are different, different crops grow in the fields and different dishes are served..."

"He discovered that much of what he had previously read had not stuck in his memory. It had all been sorted into what he could use, which was funneled into his work, and what he had no use for. Both types were forgotten as soon as they had passed through his hands and he had written his article, given his presentation or lecture or whatever he had needed them for. Now he started to think again."

"For a long time, his days had felt like an endless train of tasks hurtling toward him. It had felt this way for years, in fact. As soon as one train car had passed, the next was already on its way. And once the entire train had passed, a new one with just as many cars would appear in the distance. Days full of more work and new projects..."

"There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage."

"My voice feels as though it’s been in hibernation. It cannot sustain the lengthy stream of conversation it’s been engaging in lately."

"We couldn’t help but laugh, probably at our wavering and the oddness of our gestures, but also because we felt out of practice. We had apparently both lost the knack of greeting another person, or rather, of greeting a person we recognized and who recognized us in return."