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.
She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I’ll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time.
The thing I feared was no longer my parents’ authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.
The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.
Porque el divorcio es eso: quitarle cosas que no ya no necesita a una persona a la que ya no quieres.
All day long I can look forward to a popsicle.