Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.” “Another.
Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.
A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.” “For.
They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world – and most recently in America – the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.
And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides – no matter what Brent Council may claim – an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: ‘Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.’ Important category.
I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers – the management.
Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti.
How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?
I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.
When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.
Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending.
Happy is the novelist,” claims Nabokov, “who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.
If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.
It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.
Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.
Beggars cannot be choosers.
There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever. – E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread.
Well, you can’t make old friends.
But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can’t be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men.