She listed some relevant ingredients, goals towards which a child might grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism, satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one’s existence, and having at the centre of one’s life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.
How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.
So, getting closer, my idea was To be. Or if not that, its grammatical variant, is. This was my aboriginal notion and here’s the crux – is. Just that. In the spirit of Es muss sein. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.
Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.
Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.
As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.
Older men were better companions, they were seasoned lovers, they knew the world, they knew themselves. Unlike younger men, they held their emotions in balance. They had read more, seen more, they were warmer, kinder, less boastful, more tolerant, less violent. They were more interesting, they could choose the wine. They had more money.
No one can predict which of life’s vexations insomnia will favour.
Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union.
There’s nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he’s denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs.
My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.
Briony era una di quelle bambine possedute dal desiderio che al mondo fosse tutto assolutamente perfetto.
Our desires permeate our perceptions.
In fact, everyone he’s passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
But there was only one inevtiable end, and there was nothing they could do but go towards it.
She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby’s half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living.
When it comes to being reasonable, they rather go over the top.
The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them.
When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand.
It was exhilarating, at least at first, to live in a city of narcissists.