His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.
People think they are individuals because they use the word ″I″ so often.
Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?
Every paradise demands a serpent.
I find everything boring, therefore I’m fascinating.
Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.
Either I wake up in the Grey Zone,’ he whispered, ’and I’ve forgotten how to breathe, and my feet are so far away I’m not sure I can afford the air fare;.
At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.
Balance was so elusive: either it was like this, too fast, or there was the heavy thing like wading through a swamp to get to the end of a sentence.
Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.
She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.
Something had happened and he, like almost everyone else, had got used to the habit of life. Perhaps that’s all life was: a habit that resisted the adventure of death.
He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment’s reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art.
Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?
Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches and arches into aqueducts.
This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father’s behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it.
The Park’s nice,′ his father conceded, ’but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.
All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David’s excuse, she wondered.
He couldn’t help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and day-dreaming. These characteristics didn’t seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity.
How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.