The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason.
And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.
The rich can afford to be virtuous, the poor must shift as best they can.
Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinised as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside her to ruin him.
By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good.
How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.
Old wives’ tales – that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.
I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly.
They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists.
Nothing about him reminded me of humanity.
His tobacco had a richly herbal smell, as though it was good for you.
She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.
They look around the world and think: ‘There must be something better!’ But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now.
Do you not feel... that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.
You never saw such a wild thing as my mother.
You’re nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights.
Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time.
Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation and reverted to chaos, existing only to themselves in an unstructured world where they were not formally acknowledged, becoming an ever-widening margin of undifferentiated and nameless matter surrounding the outposts of man, who no longer made himself familiar with these things or rendered the authentic in his experience by the gift of naming.
The function of the fool in the Elizabethan drama, a reference point outside events but inside another kind of logic, the remorseless logic of unreason where all vision is deranged, all action uncoordinated and all responses beyond prediction.
Then I understood the thing I’d never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I’d wanted to be ephemeral, I’d wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you.