Erri De Luca Quotes & Sayings

The spoon is a reader's friend, scooping from the plate almost by itself. The fork requires more attention. — Erri De Luca

I love you because that piece that remains is worth the whole and I love you by exclusion of the other lost pieces. — Erri De Luca

You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier. — Erri De Luca

Death that tears away clumps of us folks, stuffs thousands of the living, freshly plucked into its sack. — Erri De Luca

That's how you keep someone tied to you, not set them free. You say no to a man and don't give him the peace of repayment. — Erri De Luca

The geometry of the things around us creates coincidences, intersections. — Erri De Luca

I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears.
After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.
I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently. — Erri De Luca

Don Raimondo tells me what he can't tell them. "The emptiness on the surface of a wall left by a sold bookshelf is the deepest I know. I take away with me the banished books, I give them a second life. Like the second coat in painting, used for finishing, a book's second life is its best." He's rescued the library of a lover of American literature. — Erri De Luca

It's disgusting to kill, Laila. You never get rid of death's grease. It doesn't wash away. — Erri De Luca

I like people who can't die in their bed. — Erri De Luca

I can hardly keep track of the things I don't know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic. — Erri De Luca

On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out. — Erri De Luca

War is when young men dream of being grandfathers. — Erri De Luca

I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world. — Erri De Luca

Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to make a contract with myself. — Erri De Luca

This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae. — Erri De Luca

I see the pain of miserly love in young people,' I say. 'You don't have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I'm careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It's not like dancing. It's like a stone walkway with a little grass between the cracks. It's strong but I will try to tread carefully and not ruin it. In Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you. — Erri De Luca

A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up. — Erri De Luca

I'm not that man anymore. No one can stay that way too long. That's why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what's behind. — Erri De Luca

Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for. — Erri De Luca

Build your house with the stones they hurled at you — Erri De Luca

You're right to say "hold on to" instead of "keep." To keep is presumptuous. To hold means you realize that today it's yours and tomorrow who knows. — Erri De Luca

When you get homesick, it's not something missing, it's something present, a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while. — Erri De Luca

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf. — Erri De Luca