But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark – that sort of make everything else seem – unimportant.
Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?
Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!
Young, gifted, and destitute...
Since that day, when people have spoken to me of “genius”, I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet’s still there.
I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together.
Val: Why do you go out there? Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice. Val: What advice do they give? Sandra: Just one word- live!
All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
The rest of my days I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die – with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. “Poor lady,” they’ll say, “The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.
The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.
I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.
When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.
I’m not good. I don’t know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody’s good.
Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!
I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.
To you, whoever you are, when I am gone – remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person. For me.
Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then... you die, or find something else.
I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again.