Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.
There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven’t had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.
I know that it’s easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.
Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.
Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us.” He chose his words with care. “Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.
In times of grief, you’re waiting for something to happen, but the thing you’re waiting for has already taken place.
How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.
She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.
But I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.
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.
I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.
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.