You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you.
When you’re young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand new penny, but before you get to wonderful you’re going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good long look, because that may be as far as you’re ever going to go.
It’s a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don’t know anymore. Or even want to know.
Nothing says hell has to be fire.
There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us.
I wasn’t safe. I wasn’t permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn’t there. There was nobody home.
It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.
If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?
I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it. And now I will have to be that person forever.
The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.
Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life – every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him – everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.
Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.
I heard this old country guy say once, “I think you decide pretty early on how happy you’re going to be, and then you just go on and be it.” But I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.
I know nothing will happen when I tell you I love you. There’s no way. You’re regular. I’m, well, whatever I am, I’m not regular. I’m not telling you because of that. I’m just telling you so that, when you hail a cab or answer the phone, when you walk into a roomful of strangers, you’ll know that there is somebody in the world who loves you and will always love you, wherever you go, whatever happens, until the end of time. Don’t ever forget that. Promise you will never forget that you are loved.
Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it’s my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o’clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.
Here’s another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it’s about to rain.
We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony.
You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless.
She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn’t change back.
Success has a million musical nuances. Failure is only the monotonous banging of a brass gong.