The Swimmer

“Everytime I hold you is the last time I hold you, I've known that since the very first time.”

“It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a deep breath and hit ‘send’.”

“It’s late, but we’re both accustomed to sleepless nights.”

“We’re all spies. What do we have if not our rumors, our half-truths, our fragments taken out of context?”

“Lie detectors don’t work on someone who can’t tell the difference between truth and lies.”

“If you're wondering why we're so convinced they have weapons of mass destruction, it's because they got them from us. We reap what we sow. Gravel, blood, lie after lie, we sow chaos, then reap the status quo.”

“Still, he’d known from the beginning it wasn’t going to work out. That there was something inside him that wasn’t enough, something inconsistent with what he and Klara were creating. Something he kept to himself, deep down in the most hidden corner of his heart.”

“were”

“She had been feeling it more and more lately. The walls were closing in around her. The emptiness, the thoughts hidden behind thick walls of work. The unfathomable futility of it all.”

“If the odds are against you, chaos is your friend.”

“We reap what we sow. Gravel, blood, lie after lie. We sow chaos and reap the status quo.”

“But one day. After ideology comes religion. Those who were our friends will become our enemies.”

“I think I must be bleeding. I think, if I’m thinking, I must be alive. I think, my arms must be here somewhere, I can feel them under the concrete. I think, what am I holding, what am I lying on top of?”

“Quando as probabilidades estão contra ti, o caos é teu amigo.”

“A bebé choraminga no berço e levantas-te, mas eu adianto-me e pego nela. Seguro-a junto ao meu peito. Sinto a sua respiração, o seu coração acelerado por entre o cobertor azul-claro e fino que a tua mãe enviou. O seu coração é o meu coração e nada justifica o abandono do nosso próprio coração. Não há desculpas nem argumentos. (..)”

“Quando te abraço, é sempre a última vez que o faço. Sei-o desde o primeiro dia. E quando voltaste, e peguei na bebé com os meus braços sonolentos, a única coisa em que conseguia pensar era que se tratava da última vez que o faria.”

“Around us, the madness of empires continues. (À nossa volta, a loucura do império persiste. Jane Hirshfield”