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- Sunday was a sad day—early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong
- I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper. Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren’t real pince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.) Francis Abernathy was his name.
- Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them,
- “The Furies,” said Bunny, his eyes dazzled and lost beneath the bang of hair. “Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.
- Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”
- “And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,”
- Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
- “Gonna be a scorcher today,” said the janitor as I passed him in the hall. “Indian summer.”
- “Have you been to his house?” “Are you kidding? He’s so secretive, you’d think it was the Manhattan Project or something.
- “They seem to argue quite a bit.” “Well, of course,” said Camilla, “but that doesn’t mean they’re not fond of each other all the same. Henry’s so serious and Bun’s so sort of—well, not serious—that they really get along quite well.”
- Henry refused to take the SATs—he’d probably score off the charts if he did, but he’s got some kind of aesthetic objection to them.
- that's so cool maybe i'll refuse to take a test too because it goes against my aesthetic
- But this facial cast of mine (that’s what I think it is, really, a way my mouth has of turning down at the corners, it has little to do with my actual moods) has worked as often to my favor as to my disadvantage.
- oh you mean Chronic Bitch Face??
- Physically, there was very little indication that anything was happening at all—they were too clever for that—but even the tiny discrepancies that squeaked through their guard I met with a kind of willful blindness. That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn’t let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same.
- in private jokes, asides in Greek or even Latin which I was well aware were meant to go over my head. Naturally, I disliked this, but there seemed nothing alarming or unusual about it; though some of those casual remarks and private jokes assumed a horrific significance much later.
- or the time Bunny turned the boat over—with Henry and Francis in it—because he thought he saw a water snake?
- omg
- Henry with his hands clasped behind his back, Satan listening patiently to the rantings of some desert prophet.
- Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny,
- I reached up and carefully took a framed Japanese print from the wall and lay it down on his desk: “Don’t touch that,” he shouted, dropping his nightstand drawer on the floor with a bang and darting over to snatch up the print. “That thing’s two hundred years old.” As a matter of fact, I knew that it was no such thing, since I happened a few weeks before to have seen him carefully razoring it from a book in the library;
- “I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.”
- you've got to be kidding.
- but since I write in Latin I don’t suppose he was able to make much sense of it.
- wow u write your diary in latin?
- “It’s unthinkable,” said Henry. “I’d rather have any job, six jobs, than beg from people.
- One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
- A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.
- These are real guys. Doing real shit.”
- This was something to the effect that, in the Underworld, a great ox costs only a penny, but I knew what he meant and in spite of myself I laughed. There was a tradition among the ancients that things were very cheap in Hell.
- Old Henry here may look like he’s got a stick up his butt but there never breathed a finer fella.
- I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but only the day before I had put in an application at the Student Services office for an apartment-sitting job, in Brooklyn, for a history professor who was studying in England over the summer. It sounded ideal—a rent-free place to stay in, nice part of Brooklyn, and no duties except watering the plants and taking care of a pair of Boston terriers, who couldn’t go to England because of the quarantine. My experience with Leo and the mandolins had made me wary, but the clerk had assured me that no, this was different, and she’d shown me a file of letters from happy students who had previously held the job. I had never been to Brooklyn and didn’t know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city—any city, especially a strange one—liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
- dream job tbh
- “It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”
- “About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.”
- “There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.
- “Don’t say ‘fuck’ anymore,” said Henry, in a quiet but ominous voice. “Fuck? What’s the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn’t that what you do to my sister every night?”
- WOW idek what to say
- Francis sent Mr. Hatch out for some cat food and each morning and evening Francis let himself in the bathroom to feed it (“Get away,” I heard him muttering, “get away from me, you devil.”) and came out again with a fouled crumple of newspaper, which he held from his body at arm’s length.
- “And what do you suppose that will solve?” “You’ve ruined my life, you son of a bitch.”
- “There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
- The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star …
nov 25 2014 ∞
nov 25 2014 +
nov 25 2014 +