There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave ‘anyhow’ and then expect to resume life where we left off.
Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations.
I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.
Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn’t disapprove of people. It cuts you off.
Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.
I’m the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.
Don’t tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.
You’ve got such nice hair, it seems a pity to dye it blue.
I am sorry,” said Monty. “I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.
You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.
I know people can be awful dooms for each other.
How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.
Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.
Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one’s life went wrong?
All dreams are sinister.
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.
Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.