Maybe that’s why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships.
A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.
…as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.
That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.
It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.
their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be
Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world “postmodernist.
What do you think about America?””Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.
But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.
What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?
Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and gravel to it.
Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.
Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?”If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
When we are sad…it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don’t change.
…with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.
He did touch people’s lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him – or what they thought was him – with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness.
…not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.
And, lying on my bed in some biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel even how my sadness can make me happy . . .
…life – whatever else it is – is short… maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.
Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.
I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I’d never known.
I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
And beauty is terror,’ said Julian, ‘then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”To live,’ said Camilla.’To live forever,’ said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.
. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?
For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn’t know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry’s ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.
It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.
Well, girls always love assholes,” said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. “Haven’t you noticed?” No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn’t Pippa love me?
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever.
…it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.” p28
Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?
You’d be surprised, Theo.” she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, “what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.
The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.
It’s a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.
I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.
Mais, vrai, J’ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I’d always hoped that someday I’d be able to use it.
The dead appear to us in dreams because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…
Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.
And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street.
People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see.
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.
Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.
But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it’s simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.
For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.
I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.
Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.