A girl’s not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it’s sweet.
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
People don’t save other people. People save themselves.
It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.
The lover’s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn’t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
You can tell when something’s not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don’t go away.
He knew a lot about his grandparents – and perhaps he feels he’s been endowed with abilities to go into people’s heads who are long dead – but, to a certain extent, he’s making it up.
We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth.
Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.
He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
It was as if, before she’d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she’d been before.
Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.