He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.
But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness (…) “I think he’s shy,” he finished
When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.
But time, I have come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs. We speak of managing time, but it is the opposite. Our lives are filled with businesses because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.
What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.
You understand that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again
I know my life’s meaningful because”- and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued- “because I’m a good friend. i love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.
. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.
There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return
They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion).
Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself , and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity
This isn’t fair, he would think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.
And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
I know my life’s meaningful because” – and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued – ” because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.
He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.
My phone rang, and although it wasn’t a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.
It’s a good story,’ he said. He even grinned at me. ‘I’ll tell you.”Please,’ I said.And then he did.
He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.
All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme’s reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
I didn’t intend the book as anything therapeutic and I don’t think that’s a novel’s goal or responsibility.
Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have nothing to write about.
That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.
It was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others.
It was the worst–the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating–writing experience I’d had…I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I’d somehow become possessed by it.
The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is rarely true.
I don’t really think of myself as gay, though,” he began, and Kit rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so naïve, Willem,” he said. “Once you’ve touched a dick, you’re gay.
He would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving person.
He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.
. . .the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn’t really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.
In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.
He placed his hand on Willem’s arm. ‘Willem, don’t cry.”I’m not going to,’ he said. ‘I can do other things in life besides cry, you know,’ although he was no longer sure that was even true.
he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong
Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.
He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.
I have never wanted a family. I don’t believe in marriage, though I obviously believe it should be legal for everyone who wants to do it. But it is not something I believe in, nor do the characters in my book, nor do any of my friends.
Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India’s north, both is and isn’t the India of the popular imagination.
I think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids.
Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn’t codified and celebrated; it’s never going to give you a party.
The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete – a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life.