David Grossman

He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out.

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.

The passing time is painful. I have lost the art of moving simply, naturally, within it. I am swept back against its flow. Angry, vindictive, it pierces me all the time, all the time with its spikes.

She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she__ been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts __he baby teeth of a snake,_ and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn__ even have to explain to her what he meant by __he opposite_; she knew it was the opposite of her.

Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he__ felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland.

and suddenly I am washed over by a wave of happiness for it, for my little story, because it is a place, a home even, and I can go back to it from wherever I am

again, her singing was her only absolute, the only thing that was completely her. a thousand classes hadn't given her this concrete insight: her voice was her place in the world, the home she leaves in the morning and returns to at night, in which she can be herself in her entirety and hope to be loved for all that she is and in spite of all she is.

One of the greatest skills any leader can master is becoming comfortable with silence.