That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.
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.
Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?
We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.
Is it possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren’t yours let you see where you are, who you are.
That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature.
We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.
That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.
But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They’re foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.
A great many men don’t understand a woman full of joy, even more don’t understand paintings full of joy by a woman.
It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough.
The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.
When you’ve nothing, at least you’ve all of it.
I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.
Words are themselves organisms,...
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.
Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.
Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.
There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is.