As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.
I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man’s room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you.
I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.
People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location.
I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.
Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us.
I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.
She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.
I shall have to learn how to miss you.
There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance.
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.