What is real is always worth it.
For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.
At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.
Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair.
Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.
The stupid things you say in the rain, that can’t ever be washed away.
And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.
The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.
A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it.
Who can judge another man’s suffering?
Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.
My hatred gives me strength.
A book’s flaws make it less predictable.
A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.
As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I’ve waited all my life for the computer.
As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.
Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I’d rather have cash.
And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.
I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But i couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked...