I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
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.
At this moment she could be a minor goddess come to attend to mortal anxiety; come to sit with grave, loving certainty and whisper, from her trance, to those who enter, It’s all right, don’t be frightened, all you have to do is die.
She will write and write. She will finish this book, then write another. She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.
I reminded myself our lives are made of changes we can’t control. Letting little things happen is a good practice.
Not eating is a vice, a drug of sorts – with her stomach empty she feels quick and clean, clearheaded, ready for a fight.
I didn’t mind touching the rough bottom of people’s good intentions.
He hadn’t remotely imagined that one morning he’d check his text messages and find love to have been lost, with approximately the degree of remorse one would feel over the loss of a pair of sunglasses.
She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved.
For years, for most of my recollected life, I’d walked carefully over a subterranean well of boredom and hopelessness that lay just beneath the thin outer layer of my imagination. If I’d stood still too long, if I’d given in to repose, I’d have fallen through. So I’d made things, gone to clubs and movies. I’d kept changing my hair.
Each day was an identical package, and the gorgeousness of them was their perfect resemblance, each to the others. Like a drug, repetition changes the size of things.
This hotel, this lobby, is precisely what she wants – the cool nowhere of it, the immaculate non-smell, the brisk unemotional comings and going’s. She feels, immediately, like a citizen of this place. It is so competent, so unconcerned.
This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead.
I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.
Most people think they’re not most people.
Cassandra wanted the same night over and over again but she believed in some hidden way that if she had the same night enough times it would all crack open, and something better than love would be revealed. Something better than music.
I’ve always maintained you can either cure your neuroses or you can just outwait them.