We immortals aren’t misers – we don’t hoard! Such things are pointless.
A road is a process, not a location.
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
If I was going to do something I didn’t want to do, I at least wanted to be remunerated for it.
It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.
I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and can be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.
The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there’s nothing you can play on it that hasn’t been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
I must admit it’s a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn’t: I’m saying nothing, you’re hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.
But it’s love that does us in.
I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up inside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.
These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards, too.
All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.
For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.
I was taking something away from her, although she didn’t know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn’t want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious “it” I couldn’t quite define.
Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.
I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I’m not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls.