"It isn't the fault of France if we're still a couple of foreigners, dear friend. It's our fault. It's a vocation, a destiny. Like our profession as interpreters, another way of always being a foreigner, of being present without being present, of existing but not existing."
Posted by Megan Power in
Picador
"I didn't know then that it wasn't even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain."
Posted by Megan Power in
Milkweed Editions
"Maybe there was a political aspect to his nausea after all What if he was responding to how the earth had been engulfed, suppressed, obscured? We were surrounded by things we hadn't asked for, and didn't want Things that upset or damaged us"
Posted by Megan Power in
OtherPress
"Everyone knew what happened next. The police would take their prisoner to a jail cell or a camp lockup, where there was nothing besides a high ceiling, four thick walls, a camera in every corner, an iron door, and a chilly cement floor. If you felt hot you could remove clothes, but if you were cold there was nothing you could do. Even in high summer this was practical problem one had to consider. If someone knocked on my door in the middle of the night, I planned to put on these warm clothes and autumn shoes before answering."
Posted by Megan Power in
Penguin Press
"His whole being revolted, he was terrified by the way Nana had for some time now been slowly invading his consciousness and taking hold of him, reminding him of the pious texts, the stories of possession by the Devil on which he had been reared. He believed in the Devil."
Posted by Megan Power in
Oxford University Press
"Over the next two years I sank, half deliberately, into a dreamy inwardness, a lush romanticism that kept an active gregariousness around it like a hard shell protecting a creamy yolk. Piano playing was the natural art form to express this."
Posted by Megan Power in
Biblioasis
"'In the meantime,' said Abrenuncio, 'play music for her, fill the house with flowers, have the birds sing, take her to the ocean to see the sunsets, give her everything that can make her happy.' He took his leave with a wave of his hat and the obligatory sentence in Latin. But this time he translated it in honor of the Marquis: 'No medicine cures what happiness cannot.'"
Posted by Megan Power in
Vintage Books
"The bright sprint to Christmas. I didn't know how I was going to keep buoyant. The exorbitant levels of pride my life seemed to demand. That, or absolutely none at all."
Posted by Megan Power in
New York Review Books
"He writes to say he loves her every eyelash, every step, every turn, every laugh. Is the eyelash overdoing it, should he leave it out? He decides to keep it, but changes the period after 'laugh' into a comma, and goes on: everything but your immortal soul, with which I haven't had the pleasure."
Posted by Megan Power in
New Directions