The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words.
Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or companion in grief.
We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.
By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.
Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable.
A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.
When she felt the baby turn in her underwater world she remembered Quietly. The future was unfathomable, but with every heartbeat she carried her daughter towards it.
They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
Once you said a thing, it could never be taken back and would be taken up and repeated and altered and told again, no matter how misshapen and out of true. Better to say nothing.
Helena was very quiet these days. She seemed pleased about the baby, talked from time to time about plans for their lives to come, but her liveliness had gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.
He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour but in the infinity of memory.
I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.
She stares up- and downriver in search of something. Something she longs for. Something she has been expecting every day, and every day it doesn’t come, and still she waits and still she looks and still she yearns, but the hope dwindles with every day that passes. Now she waits hopelessly.
Death did not frighten her. In those years she had tended the dying, witnessed their demise, and laid out the dead. Death by sickness. Death in childbirth. Death by accident. Death by malice, once or twice. Death as the welcome visitor to great age.
The past had no hold on him. Perhaps that’s why his vision of the future was so strong. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? You.
Though children are capable of great cruelty. Only we do not like to think it of them.
It was laconic, but it was true. As soon as you started to put more words in, you came to unreason.
What’s the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person’s despair?
I can’t do nothing.” She looked at him fondly. “No. You were never any good at that.
Although Mr. Montgomery must have been sixty, he had the unlined face of an infant. After forty years of practicing a poker face in the office, the muscles that twitch and tauten in response to doubt, worry, or suspicion had atrophied to the degree that it was now impossible to read any kind of expression in his face other than a general and permanent bonhomie.