There’s a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella – and was necessary to it.
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill...
She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.