The still-alives. They were all crazy.
Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.
You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there’s a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.
I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust. Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I’m silent forever, haha, it’s all words words words with me. Now that I can’t just reach out and touch, it’s all I want, is to.
Myself, I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn’t thinking about you, I thought about you.
He was clearly in love with Amber too, and this time it wasn’t the usual water off the back of the duck. Instead, the duck, wounded by a hunter and bewildered because half its head had been shot way, and was still tottering about on its webby feet by the side of the pond. From the one side it looked like a duck usually looks. From the other, it was a different story.
God almighty. It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.
Looking in the mirror suddenly she thinks that we all know our dates of birth but that every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.
Her father was stern. Her father disapproved. Her father had very strong reservations... Half Belgian, half Persian, staunch British conservative, he’d seen the Himalayas and Harrogate and had chosen accountancy.
There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is... It’s the never-ending leaf-fall.
His little sister is brilliant. She is at her desk deep in a book, half-opened books all over her desk, all over the floor and the bed. She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.
She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant.
It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I’ve never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous again.
The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn’t feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren’t for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.
Maybe it’s easier to talk to someone who won’t ever actually hear what you say.
But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we’ll find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened.
Self-deprecation is almost always distasteful, his mother says.
Beauty is the true way to change things for the better. To make things better. There should be a lot more beauty in all our lives. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. There is no such thing as fake beauty. Which is why beauty is so powerful. Beauty assuages.
Anyone who gives wings to another’s shoulders, and then along the way gradually spreads out a hidden net, extinguishes completely the ardent charity enkindled by love precisely where it most desires to burn.
How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other.