The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages.
Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them.
The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It’s a moment never to be thought of except when it’s in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn’t seem peculiar. It is only me. I don’t think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.
It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?
The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.
I know it’s thankless to be sensible in the face of someone’s primitive distrust.
A sunset is the story of the world’s day.
Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin.
The world was a series of fleeting gratifications.
She is beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between.
But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I’ve been fighting all my life.
When the going gets tough the tough get going.
I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.
There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.
Everyone wants to own the end of the world.
Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.
What about the Americans?” “Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends.
If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty.
We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.” “Gorgeous evasions,” he said. “Great escapes.
To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.