Opera cuts to the chase – as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
I can’t do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.
He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.
Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism?
The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning?
Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.
Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.
Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.
Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.
I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history – Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, “There’s someone missing.” That felt correct, in both senses.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.
What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?
Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.
I want a more difficult life, that’s all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It’s to do with me, not you; so don’t worry.
We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition – and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.
And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.
I can see there might be a positive side to this wilful averting of the eye: ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.