On the way to Francis’s, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us. “That,” said Henry, “is a very bad omen.” But of what he wouldn’t say.
Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth.
Delirium: unmoored and drifting.
I hate Gucci,” said Francis. “Do you?” said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. “Really? I think it’s rather grand.” “Come on, Henry.” “Well, it’s so expensive, but it’s so ugly too, isn’t it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.
I don’t think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would’ve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place.
It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came.
He doesn’t care that Bunny is dead. I could forgive him if that was why he felt this way, but it isn’t. He wouldn’t care if we killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it.
Black birds. Disastrous lead-colored skies out of Egbert van der Poel.
Regardless of what Julian felt for me, there was no denying that what I felt for him was love and trust of a very genuine sort. As my own parents had distanced themselves from me more and more – a retreat they had been in the process of effecting for many years – it was Julian who had grown to be the sole figure of paternal benevolence in my life, or, indeed, of benevolence of any sort. To me, he seemed my only protector in the world.
I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.
Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, and old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.
Because, what I am trying to say – what I was thinking in the car from Antwerp last night – good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions. Scary idea!
Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.
She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment.
I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.
Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else.
The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world.
That is not the point,” he said. “I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.
Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I’d never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn’t understand, towards an end I did not know.
Across those unbridgeable distances – between bird and painter, painting and viewer – I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific.