Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.
Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.
No one would be able to name what had happened or would wish to name it. Rape was a word that came not be spoken at High Point Farm.
For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.
In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?
Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and “brooding” windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As.
You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.
A familiar story, Marya instructs herself – a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.
The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.
Secrets have always been easy for me, it’s the opposite of secrets that is hard.
Love is not enough to keep us from harm.
An adult man possesses the power to enter your soul. A boy has no power, The power to hurt, maybe, but not the power to enter your soul.
Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be – to become – normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.
Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.
Out of obscurity I came. To obscurity I can return.
To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully ‘comprehended’ narrative – this is the greatest happiness of the writer’s life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of ’normality.
In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term – peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.
Popular! In America, what else matters?
As our great American philosopher William James has said, an individual has as many selves as there are individuals whom he knows. There isn’t the slightest hypocrisy in this, but only pragmatic ethics. For not all persons are worthy of our acquaintance, and not all persons require equal time from us. You save your most valuable ‘personality’ for the most valuable persons you know.
A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.