Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music
The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.
The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.
But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know.
He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.
Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.
If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.
It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled.
We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.
She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost
Is it the smoke?’ the boy said, shivering slightly. ‘I’ve never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one…like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart…and one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging.
I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,’ Moody said carefully. ‘Luck is by nature underserved.
Pritchard was lonely, and like most lonely souls, he saw happy couples everywhere.
What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?
I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.
To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.