When it’s gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. You’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth
There’s a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.
However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.
Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. –Solar
She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,”He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.
Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end.
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means.
Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air
But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me
Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.
…children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.
I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!
…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.
You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.
He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.
Memory’s got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.
I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.
He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
Perhaps I’d been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don’t have to comply with a request just because it’s reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.
Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future,
In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.
…I experienced a sudden ache — part desolation, part panic — to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.
Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.
It wasn’t torpor that kept her – she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.
All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?
Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.
But this inglorious revolution wasn’t for me. I didn’t want a sex shop in every town.
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.
Or he was simply pretending—like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.
While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.
It’s the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?
Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
He’s never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.