But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?
The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.
It’s the end of the world every day, for someone.
She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.
Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.
If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.
How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being?
Nobody’s heart is perfect.
But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness – what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting.
I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life.
She doesn’t think it’s a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice?
Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.
How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.
We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.
If you do bad things for reasons you’ve been told are good, does it make you a bad person?
But sins must not be overlooked simply because the sinner is skilled.
I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of her life, or of her life, or of his life – the thing he was longing to know. The thing he’d always wanted.
The shroud itself became a story almost instantly. ‘Penelope’s web’, it was called; people used to say that of any task that remained mysteriously unfinished. I did not appreciate the term web. If the shroud was a web, then I was a spider. But I had not been attempting to catch men like flies: on the contrary, I’d merely been trying to avoid entanglement myself.