She rides a midnight train

to steal your heart and brain

your dream, your heroine

seduced by heavens skin

Her life’s a mystery

you try so hard to see

for every small detail

she hides behind her veil

You don’t know her name

You pay to play this game …

– The underground youth – Veil

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ySLduW5kpk

A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

– Alice Munro –

Ph : Javier Vallhonrat

Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place … and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted …

when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost.

– Javier Marías –

Ph : Alain Daussin

And we offer each other words of consolation or distraction or encouragement when we see that one or the other of us is in need of such words.

We also miss each other (vaguely) when we’re not together, she’s one of those people (in everyone’s life there are four or five such people whose loss one truly feels) to whom you’re used to telling everything that happens to you, that is, one of those people you think about when something happens to you, be it funny or dramatic, and for whom you store up events and anecdotes. You accept misfortunes gladly because you know you can tell those five people about them afterwards.

– Javier Marías –

Ph : Alain Daussin

One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion. Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed, rare is the close bond that does not grow twisted or knotted and, in the end become so tangled that a razor or knife is needed to cut it.

– Javier Marías –

The day we didn’t spend together, we will never spend together, what someone was going to say to us on the phone when they called and we didn’t answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of the lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you.

….none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so, and having dared to speak to you the same as if we’d remained silent

– Javier Marías –

Ph : Olivier Kervern