Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?
She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?
She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start – she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.
Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.
Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?
It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in – but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.
It’s hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.
This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglomeration of dull little towns. She made a resolution never to live in any of them.
Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.
It’s beautiful here and we’re still unhappy.
The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.
In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.
I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee.
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.
I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
When its gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. you’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.