Karl was no glamour boy. But even during this first meeting I discovered he had something better. The kind of intelligence that’s more attractive than physical beauty.
The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.
I cannot live without reading.
And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.
Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones. They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who’s in them.
I thought how lovely and how strange a river is...
Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.
You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.
Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.
Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy.
Yet, isn’t it strange, isn’t it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as ‘facts.’ Yes, I know that in this case one ‘fact’ was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a ‘fact,’ and act on it as if it were true.
I am without any doubt whatever a NON-actor. For a start, the gushing pretension of would-be actors puts me off. Ergo ego. I watch them preening in front of the rehearsal mirrors in the drama hall. Just waiting for applause. All they want is to be liked. Plus admired, adored, idolized, flattered, etc. And they’re more like groupy than glue. If they’re on their own for more than five minutes they get withdrawal symptoms and go walkabout, looking for kindred lost souls to coagulate with.
Don’t be his story. Don’t be anyone else’s story. Be your own story. Protect yourself.
Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being.” She cleared her throat again. “Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.
It’s like a sleepover, when you feel you can say all kinds of things, because the darkness hides your blushes.
And in short measures life may perfect be.
At the end of things we turn into historians. Sometimes happy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes regretful or bitter, sometimes to reassure ourselves that we have amounted to something, however small. And sometimes, as I am doing now, to try with the wisdom of hindsight to make sense of ourselves.
Unless you find yourself in a book, you have a hard time finding anybody else.
Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction.