"You're not a failure," she told him one day. "No. You're not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You're just unlucky. Like someone... like someone who..." (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she's understood me, I'm not a professional failure!)---"That's it. You're like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You're an explosion still waiting to be heard."
Andrei Makine from The Life of an Unknown Man

"The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked. I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential."
from Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine