I think, therefore I spam.
I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.
Pain marks you, but too deep to see.
That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I’ve reached now. But how else could I see it. We can’t really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it’s as tourists.
The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.
You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.
Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view – I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can’t see me at all.
Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.
The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.
But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.
Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.
How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.
He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn’t love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn’t matter so I didn’t have to care.
Falling in love... how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing, the way you understood yourself.
One by one I could handle them, but if they combined into a mob of three I would have trouble. Divide and conquer would be my motto.
So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance.
They say, Grace, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose Miss I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more.
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.