There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.
I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.
It’s hard being left behind. (…) It’s hard to be the one who stays.
It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.
I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?
Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.
I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn’t stand losing. But it’s too late for that.
Don’t you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?
I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.
Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.
Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.
one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.
I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.
We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.
I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room
You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.
…all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.
. . .Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry H
Mama said, “Dreams are different to real life but important too.
It’s terrific, Clare,” Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, “Don’t leave me.
Knowing the future is different from being told what I like.
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older.
That is what madness is, isn’t it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don’t make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it’s not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.
I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.
Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.
You’re my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.
When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.
We come to a house and walk down the small walkway to its backyard. In the yard there are two screens and a slide projector. People are seated in lawn chairs, watching slides of trees.
Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.
He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds – mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh – it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.
He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.
But I don’t want to just believe it, I want it to be true.
Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.
I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.
I want my own bed, in my own apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home.
Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.
Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.
I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.
Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?” her husband, Jack, asked her. “I’m bored with knitting. I’ve taken up arson
But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.
…and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him- Clare
The space that I can call mine, that isn’t full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.
Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.