Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you’d understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
Just because life’s meaningless doesn’t mean we can’t experience it meaningfully.
Once you’ve stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart’s just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don’t love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim’s incredulity’s potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.
Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.
The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.
The rain’s been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing’s going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?
Your ideal possession candidate’s a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she’s romantically besotted.
One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.
The message is clear: By all means become an abomination – but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
You love life because life’s all there is.
Every present anger derives from past weakness.
Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.
Time, you’ll be pleased to know – and since one must start somewhere – was created in creation. The question What was there before creation? is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it.
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.