What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?
She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame – and more than fame, actual immortality – implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer.
Superstitions are a comfort sometimes, I don’t know why you so adamantly refuse all comforts.
What you are, more than anything, is alive.
Not all people were meant to be lovers.
Here they are, this once-prosperous couple, shocked, altered, dragged before the seat of the conqueror who’d promised it was only the servants and petty thieves who’d suffer.
Is this what it’s like to go crazy? She’d never imagined it like this.
It’s remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow...
It’s remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow, passing the window of the liquor store, which offers an array of bottles surrounded by tiny blinking lights,; seeing her own reflection skim across the glass; being, once again, able to recieve the ordinary pleasures, boots on the pavement, hands in the pockets of her jacket...
This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.
I admit it – there was a streak of sadism in my lusts. There was the taint of vanity. I choose ordinary men who would not refuse; who would feel lucky to have me. I did not thrill to the sight of their flesh – which was either bulky or scrawny but always abashed and grateful – so much as I did to the fact of their capture.
She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses.
His father had a merciless eye that could find one bad straw in ten bales of good intentions.
I used to want to be a cheerleader,” I told them. “Before I decided to just go to hell.
If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I’d want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven’t begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it. Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity.
I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I’d been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand.
This moment may come to us all, at some point in our eventutal move from health into sickness. We abandon our old obligation to consider the needs of others, and give ourselves up to their care. There is a shift in status. We become citizens of a new realm, and although we retain the best and worst of our former selves we are no longer bodily in command of our fates.
Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight.
He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who’s learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.
There is so little love in the world.