Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.
He doesn’t take a photo or a video because he wants to remember – by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can’t capture.
I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn’t talking to them.
I’m a woman. And I’m a man. That’s how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn’t do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.
To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.
When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been.
We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.
The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.
Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.
Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos- and it’s pain.
I’ve thought of killing myself many times. I don’t do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What’s my life? I make money and I make memories. That’s not a life. I don’t kill myself because living is my own life sentence.
When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.
Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.
There are valleys that lead to the bottom of the world, so it seems, but what world is that? The universe has no sides, no end, can’t be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. The more sophisticated my equipment, the stranger the worlds it detects. I sometimes think I’m sailing through a vast thought.
If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.
There’s this world,’ she banged the wall graphically, ‘and there’s this world,’ she thumped her chest. ‘If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.
Going mad is the beginning of a process, it’s not meant to be the end result.
And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature.