Perfection exacts a price, but it’s the imperfect who pay it.
But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.
But who can remember pain, once it’s over?
The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can’t wish, why bother?
That’s what you get for being food.
In case you’re wondering, vanity never ends.
Sanity is a valuable possession: I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.
Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?
Don’t blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have.
Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew – you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who’ve simply been present at them.
If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.
Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn’t seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.
But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.
Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed – against reason – that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth.
He throws out radiance, it must be reflected sun. Why isn’t everyone staring?
I’d like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please.
Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.