And – maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this – but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest.
As for Charles – well, basically, he likes girls. If he’s drunk, I’ll do. But – just when I’ve managed to harden my heart, he’ll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don’t know why.
My heart – which, thrilled at my daring, had held its breath for a moment or two – began suddenly to beat quite wildly.
The thing to remember,” said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, “is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what.” He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he’d just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church.
Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were fixed.
Even if life is great – keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.
Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.
Un yo que no quieres. Unos sentimientos que no puedes evitar.
That life – whatever else it is – is short.
I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus.
Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.
Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.
I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How it would feel to be back in my body again I couldn’t imagine.
The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.
You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.
When we are sad – at least I am like this – it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.
The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.
No – ” his hands came together on the table – “it was one of the first antiques I ever bought, thirty years ago. In an American Folk sale. I’m not a great one for the folk art, never have been – this piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?
Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me.