That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.
There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.
We’re often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don’t stop to think about what it means.
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive.
This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?
In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.
This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear.
I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself.
All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.
To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.
The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover – after one was taken – that it hadn’t been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn’t love, and then to discover years later – old and unconsoled – that it had been. No: the worst thing – the worst, worst thing – was this having to decide.
Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.
London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once – the urgent and the always – each in earshot of the other.
It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.
Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.
Everything can be restored. If one won’t believe that, how does one endure all this?
One didn’t understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one’s hands and face and clothes clean. The world’s surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.