Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event or two – a schism or a death, a fire or a mutiny, the loss of a home or the destruction of a tea set.
Happiness, in my experience, is like a bowl of bananas, because if you pay too much attention, it gets gobbled away, but if you forget all about it, either a robber steals it or it ends up rotten mush. It can be tricky to keep one’s happiness intact, and the interference of a supermarket strikes me as only making things trickier.
It is one thing to think horrible thoughts, but it is another to behave atrociously, as you know. You can easily think of times when you were horrible, and when I say easily I mean it is very easy to remember these times and hard to stop remembering. They ache in the brain and the body, these shameful memories, like a broken bone that has never quite healed right.
Tea is difficult to drink quickly, because it is hot and needs time to steep, and so a cup of tea forces you to slow down and think as you wait for it to cool and become more flavorful.
I watched her eyes sweep across the scrap of paper more than twice. A fantastic librarian reads everything two times at least.
I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else... and I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.
In a manner of speaking,” I said, using one of my favorite ways of saying “No, you are wrong.
The past can be as difficult to imagine as the future. It would be helpful in life, as in confusing books, to have an author, if that’s the right word, explaining to us everything we find bewildering, in the hopes we all might feel better.
It can be powerful to write the name of a person you have kissed or even just someone you wish you had kissed, on a scrap of paper where no one else can see, or carved into the trunk of a tree where everyone can. It is even powerful just to write it down in your mind when you are alone.
Some people, however, say that they do not eat eggs because they do no like them. This is suspicious. Eggs are tremendously flexible and can be prepared in a variety of ways, all of which are different experiences in one’s mouth. If you say you do not like eggs, it is like saying you do not like books or light or wearing a ball gown. It means you simply have not found the right kind.
If you enter a library looking for a particularly quiet place to read, head straight for the philosophy section. Because no one likes to read philosophy, no one will be there, and you will be undisturbed to read, to write or just to think and keep watch, as I do and have always done.
Bye bye doggie.
It is very embarrassing to cry when other people can see you, but it is something we all do eventually.
You can’t hate old people, because if you are not an old person, you will become an old person, or die while trying to do so.
It was a familiar feeling, to be hurrying someplace without really knowing what is going on. When I was a child, this happened all the time, because when you are a child, nothing is your business, and you are constantly being yanked one place or another with no satisfying explanation provided by the adults doing the yanking, and so you soon get used to being in a constant state of bewilderment.
There are so many objects that I find that I have forgotten about until they are in my hands again, and they remind me of times in my life I had otherwise forgotten, the way you will visit a place you think is new and then something, a sound or smell or some tiny detail, will make you realize it is familiar after all.
Each meal you eat is poison, because the food is just moving you through the world and the end of your time in it. Dinner is poison, and lunch. Brunch and eleveneses and both afternoon and bedtime snacks are poison, and so is breakfast the next morning, all these meals bringing us closer and closer to death.
If your mind is on a book, for example, you may see the world of the book around you, even if you are not reading at the time.
Life is like this, and literature, imaginary conversations and true stories mingling like languages in translation.
In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes.
Perhaps the person holding the camera just caught me at a moment where I was not displaying my happiness, or perhaps I did not quite know I was happy. You do not always know you are happy when you are happy. Sometimes you can’t really tell when you are happy until it is over and you are thinking about it later.