Literature is humanity’s broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It’s humanity without the judgement.
Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.
I’m in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.
Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.
The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep’s got to teach.
Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.
Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.
One knows one’s madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.
Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It’s a survival necessity. You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.
All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its... motivation.
Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?
Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt, The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jeweled with tears.
There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.
He was quiet, cooperative. He’d made his decision. He knew his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It’s a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job.
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.
Human love didn’t eradicate God, but it put Him into His proper distant second place.
The only way to be sure of never losing the ones you love. The Dahmer Method. Extreme, but effective.
Moll is immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman: yet Moll is marvellous.
The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.
You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do.
But what’s heartbreak? A feeling. I’ve had it with feelings, even if they haven’t had it with me.