It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.
Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Like the trains, she’s never on time and always departing.
There is never only one, of anyone.
Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.
After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
It’s clear, it’s fresh, like a mint candy.
Toast is me. I am toast.
All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.
There is no fool like an educated fool...
Instead I will say, “Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.” These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.
Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.
I don’t know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.
You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.