It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying...

Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I...

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make...

And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me.

A foreign language is like a frail, delicate muscle. If it is not used, it weakens.

A state of voluntary expectation in ignorance and hope ... That's how many people lived.

No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.

He regretted his surliness when she had refused. She was the only person he'd met in his adult life who had any understanding of his past, the only woman he wanted to remain connected to. He didn't...

The next time she visits her father she'll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing...

She'd told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother's absence would always be present in her thoughts....

At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular...

... I needed a different language: a language that was a place of affection and reflection. -Antonio Tabucchi

People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can't shoot back.

It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet,...

They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The

What she'd done for him, because he'd asked.

What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.

So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.