As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.
Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests.
No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.
He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety.
Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.
Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they’re venal and weak it’s because we are.
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.
Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism.
Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.
You can be at certain parties and not really be there.
We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.
This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self.
There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.
That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.
But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color – blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut – but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.
What fire dies when you feed it?
Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.
You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.
What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others.