And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
All her grace was in her vagueness. Her voice was soft, her manner languid, her features blurred and dreamy.
In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.
To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!
With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.
No. I’ve always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions.
Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?
Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. 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.
Hely’s feelings didn’t run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.
Mais, vrai, J’ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I’d always hoped that someday I’d be able to use it.
Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe.
It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.
When you’re worried about something,′ said Henry abruptly, ’have you ever tried thinking in a different language?
A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burning himself with matches. Evidently that sort of thing built soldierly character. “The trick,” he’d said in the movie, “is not to mind that it hurts.” In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, this was a trick well worth learning.
Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.
WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall.
The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I’d never known.
Asparagus is in season.
Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn’t really know it,” he said. “It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized.
Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.