Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel – a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they’d always longed for but couldn’t ever grasp.
The internet is 95 percent porn and spam.
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it’s used for baby girls. It’s a wonder the military hasn’t got on to this.
A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.
And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers.
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.
It made him feel invisible – not that he wanted to feel anything else.
I didn’t want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past – the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you. I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you can’t.
What is the real breath of a man – the breathing out or the breathing in?
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.