The Eighth Life: (for Brilka) The International Bestseller

Chocolate was now just a memory of another age, and without chocolate people forgot sweetness, and without sweetness they forgot childhood, and without childhood they forgot the beginning, and without the beginning they couldn’t see the end.

should I somehow do it myself and not place any expectations on him, as David had advised me — should I start with myself? But how? How could I expect nothing from him? When you loved someone — you had to expect something, didn’t you?

I thought about my childhood and tried to reconstruct the pictures that had been in my mind as I’d read Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Colette and Miller, Voltaire and Diderot, Genet, Duras.

Having everything is like having nothing, Taso.

had told him that literature was the ‘anchor in the black lake of life’.

‘And if you don’t know who you are, then look at all the possible versions of you, find the most impossible one, and become that,’

‘You can’t live for anyone else, Niza, and nobody can live for you. And it would be terrible if you could. You become what you want to be, and leave other people alone.’

cantankerous

‘The Blue Horns’, whose poems Stasia thought so incredibly beautiful.