Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.
The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.
I didn’t appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?
I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.
Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Shame is something you’ll find a lot of – particularly Catholic – girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That’s the way to crush a girl.