He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.
You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.
That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.
History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.
Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.
Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it’s offered?
If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.
Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.
I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t!
You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you.
I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state.
It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom- and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life.
Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him... The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival...
Change is also loss.
As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth is, when the truth can’t help you!
They thought her strange, she knew. They would not blame the difficult world. Everyone else dealt with it. Why couldn’t she?
Like God, my father expressed himself through absence: it was easier, perhaps, to be grateful to someone who wasn’t there.
The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.
I believe there are certain moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!
Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?
In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.