I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?
I keep telling this story – different people, different places, different times – but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.
Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about.
You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, ‘Tristan.’ I answered you: ‘Isolde.’ Isolde. The world became a word.
I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?
It’s not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
I choose this story above all others because it’s a story I’m struggling to end.
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself – my fossil-love.
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
Why is the measure of love loss?
There are voices and they must be heard.
Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.
Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.
Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.
I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
Slightest accidents open up new worlds.
Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.