The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.
First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.
There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.
They say time finds you out, don’t they?
Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another.
Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great here as those of guerrilla attack or nuclear war.
Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story.
Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.
Music – good music, great music – had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.
In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony.
Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.
I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight.
I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.
Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.
He thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it.
People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.
But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness.