Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.
When Handel had his breakdown, he was, according to my opera-loving mother, “the ideal man” in that state, honourable, loving the world he could no longer be a part of, even if the world was a place of continual war.
Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.
He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.
No story is ever told just once.
This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else’s poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you.
We have art,’ Nietzsche said, ’so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.
Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend.
If you grow up with uncertainty, you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own.
At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.
He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes.
I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?
This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe.
He was a man of many doors. Were there other professions he nestled into, even briefly for an hour or two?
Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence.
The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states.
There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not.
The Darter must have been amazed by such rules and beliefs in a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who would go on to cordon off the bad habits of his life so efficiently.
It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.
People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.