You only have so many days in your life to try to be happy.
One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.
A tiger of light from the transoms prowled the clean pine floor.
Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.
She’d never met a child with beady eyes before. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age.
The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair.
Jude understood then how even the things you loved most could kill you. He stored this knowledge in his bones and thought of it with every decision he made from then on.
A woman growing like a goldfish to the size of her bowl, the only escape the final leap.
Whether the weather be cold, whether the weather be hot, we’ll be together whatever the weather whether we like it or not.
We have all had stupid youths,′ said Mathilde. ‘I find them delicious.
This is either the eye or we’ve made it through, I said. Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know.
In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil.
For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter.
Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It.
She is mad in both senses: angry and insane.
It’s true that the world is overrun with terrorists. It’s true that the mother no longer goes to movies in theaters, and she scans for the exits in restaurants. Deeper, worse, the death everywhere, the surgical strikes, the eyes in the sky. Aleppo in the beautiful before, the ravaged after. She puts these thoughts away. If she could, she’d spend the entire day in bed.
Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering.
I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing.
Now, don’t sigh for envy at my week-end; I am sure it is to be dull, my dear, and you know my horrible shyness and how I loathe such things. If only I had your vivacity and beauty! Alas, what we love in others does not always suit ourselves. I shall get through the weekend by wishing you in my place.
I like a bit of spunk in a lady.