I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
The secret of flight is this – you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
There is a beauty in the world, though it’s harsher than we expect it to be.
These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody’s little display of genius.
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.
She has failed. She wishes she didn’t mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.
Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.
One of the troubles with love is, you can’t talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs.
What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep.
Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can’t.
He’s filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.
There’s no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze – the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations.
She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us.
There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
Mensen zijn dom. Op een trommel slaan om een beer aan het dansen te krijgen, terwijl we de sterren zouden willen ontroeren.