Erri De Luca Quotes

Build your house with the stones they hurled at you

I like people who can't die in their bed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.