Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?
Please, God, send me something to adore.
Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?
She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.
Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.
What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It’s James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it’s Marilyn heading off to bed.
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.
That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.
We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another.
That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half.
A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they’re so eager to get to the light on the other side.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.