One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.
It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.
It’s the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you’d expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?
Beauty – the beauty Peter craves – is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn’t shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he’s young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it’s something the old tend to forget.
Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature’s only subjects; but if men’s standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.
Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.
Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small.
She doesn’t really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her.
These hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope more than anything, for more.
Everything is infected with brightness, throbbing with it, and she prays for dark the way a wanderer lost in the desert prays for water. The world is every bit as barren of darkness as a desert is of water. There is no dark in the shuttered room, no dark behind her eyelids. There are only greater and lesser degrees of radiance. When she’s crossed over to this realm of relentless brilliance, the voices start.
Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.
If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you’d better learn to praise the small felicities.
Welcome to the darker side of love.
Who knows what succession of girls and boys sneak in through the sliding glass doors at night, after the mother has sunk to the bottom of her own private lake, with the help of Absolut and Klonopin?
I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn’t hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. It’s the nature of crowds. They don’t stay long, unless you give them reason.
And maybe – maybe – love will arrive, and remain.
There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.
She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.
He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.