She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.
I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.
Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy – it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.
A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard’s twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly misunderstood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.
If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. 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.
I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing – loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply, “Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing – loads of white people.
It seems to me,” said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, “that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.
Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.
My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.
Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.
White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.
We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.
My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.
We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.
But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?
Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.
My evidence – such as it is – is almost always intimate. I feel this – do you? I’m struck by this thought – are you?
If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.
Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you.
There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.