In order to write novels for a living – it’s not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I’m working on.
My father died in my arms. That’s tumult. That’s everything exploding.
We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.
Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.
And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.
You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.
The things you’ll never do don’t get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can’t see the dim light at either end.
And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway. Telling.
Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you.
I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.
I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do.
A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.
It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.
The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became – like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.
There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.
It’s odd how our fears, the ones we didn’t know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.
I’m a verb, Frank. Verbs don’t answer questions.
Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged.
It’s hard to go through life without killing someone.