- For the present, it's almost as if Mother weren't really dead. The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak....
- What these and the hangover from a poor night's sleep, I found my eyes and thoughts growing blurred.
- Really, nothing in my life had changed.
- "Times gone mighty fast this evening," he added, and in a way that was true. I wanted to be in bed, only it was such an effort making a move.
- Then she said she wondered if she really loved me or not. I, of course, couldn't enlighten her as to that. And, after another silence, she murmured something about my being "a queer fellow." "And I daresay that's why I love you," she added. "But maybe that's why one day I will come to hate you."
- Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.
- All normal people, I added as on afterthought, had more or less desired the death of those they loved, at some time or another.
- Except for these privatizations I wasn't too unhappy. Yet again, the whole problem was: how to kill time.
- I hadn't grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, so distended that they ended up by overlapping on each other. In fact, I never thought of days as such; only the words "yesterday and "tomorrow" still kept some meaning.
- "You've got to understand," he added. "You've got to understand." But no one seemed to understand.
- I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future, to think back.
- I found that my mind had gone blurred; everything was dissolving into a grayish, watery haze.
- She was smiling, but I could tell that she was rather anxious. But my heart seemed to turned to stone and I couldn't even return her smile.
- One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
- Another thing I did to deflect the course of my thoughts was to listen to my heart. I couldn't imagine that this faint throbbing which had been with me for so long would ever cease.
- I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before.
- I could see the chaplain was an old hand at it, as his gaze never faltered. And his voice was quite steady when he said: "Have you no hope at all? Do you really think that when you die you die outright, and nothing remains?" I said: "Yes."
- Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn't even be sure of being alive.
apr 7 2012 ∞
apr 27 2012 +
apr 27 2012 +