But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it’s her excessive love that pushes him away.
How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn’t you? Look harder. It’s where someone got axed in the snow.
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.
It wasn’t so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I’ve connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there’s no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn’t him.
We’ve learned to see the world in gasps.
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much.
Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?