She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the “me” she seemed so jealously to covet.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.
The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There’s something baggy about the sky.
Life is essentially one long search for an ashtray.
He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see.
The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.
One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for.
You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.
The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.
He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate...
His eyes were holes in the world.
He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.
There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.
Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.
If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.
Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up of mostly objects.
Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients’ own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus.
The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. States as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude – but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict.