Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo.
The twentieth century was wedded to the remembrance of things past, with Proust making the act of remembrance an art of sensory timeslip in the first texts which would become A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1913 and with Joyce making an epic forever out of a single passing ordinary day with the serialization of the first chapters of Ulysses not long after.
Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.
EM Forster, though, saw it a little more evenhandedly: ’when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.
She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
It was cruel, though, to want to, and tempting, so I’d become an expert at almost.
Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.
Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small.
In her dream, she slapped the past in its face.
See how it’s deep in our animal nature, Daniel said. Not to see what’s happening right in front of our eyes.
I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful. I.
Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there’s even more language waiting to come up.
Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what’s unthinkable and impossible at one time will easily be possible in another.
Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere.
But we didn’t fit, he and I. He thought it was because he was too old. He was older, and compared to the age I was I did think he was ancient. He was in his sixties then. Well, now I know that your sixties feel the same as all the other ages, and your seventies. You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.
Believe me. Everything is meant.
Got a light? See? Careful. I’m everything you ever dreamed.
When pre-planned theatre is replacing politics, she said, and we’re propelled into shock mode, trained to wait for whatever the next shock will be, served up shock on a 24 hour newsfeed like we’re infants living from nipple to sleep to nipple to sleep.
She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death.