Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?
I contented myself with whiskey, for medicinal purposes. It helped numb my various aches and pains. Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain; it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.
He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
I’ll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel.
Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
She’s letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble.
Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.
That’s how stories happen – with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
When there’s nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently.
Is this what it means to go back to square one? Most likely. He had nothing left to lose, other than his life.
One listless day followed another, with nothing to distinguish one from the next. You could have changed the order and no one would have noticed.
If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well.
You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.
I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.
Age certainly hadn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.