You couldn’t beat him away from Greek with a stick.
For the truth of the situation was that he would do whatever she asked of him, whatever it was, and they both knew it.
Probably I’ll be dead soon.
She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.
We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.
And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn’t see her as I did – if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her – that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her.
But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless.
What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten.
When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever.
The days were so much alike I barely noticed the months pass.
I hope I die in the night.
She raised up on tiptoe and gave me a cool, soft kiss that tasted of Popsicles. Oh you, I though, my heart beating fast and shallow.
We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing sbowers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers.
I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.
El amor es un maestro cruel y terrible. Uno pierde su yo en favor del otro, pero al hacerlo se esclaviza y se convierte en un desdichado.
Si tenemos un alma lo bastante fuerte, podemos arrancarnos el velo y contemplar cara a cara la desnuda y terrible belleza; dejar que el dios nos consuma, nos devore, nos quiebre los huesos. Y luego nos escupa renacidos.
You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the light?
It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.
Andy’s mother, with her understated jewelry and her not-quite-interested smile – the kind of woman who could get on the phone with the mayor if she needed a favor – seemed.
I think he felt the need to make a noble gesture, something to prove to us and to himself that it was in fact possible to put those high cold principles which Julian had taught us to use. Duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice.