- “Being made redundant can change people’s lives,”
- “You know, you can only actually help someone who wants to be helped,”
- “But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with them? To help them through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?”
- “I didn’t want to think how it would feel, to lie trapped in a bed you couldn’t get out of with only dark thoughts to keep you company through the small hours.”
- “It would be nice – just for once – if someone paid attention to what I wanted.”
- “The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life ... is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.”
- “There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life – real life – seems to exist at one remove.”
- “Spring arrived overnight, as if winter, like some unwanted guest, had abruptly shrugged its way into its coat and vanished, without saying goodbye.”
- “You were just the absence he was always striving to impress.”
- “He had the kind of face that became instantly invisible in crowds.”
- “‘How do you know? You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?'”
- “... every single place I go to now people look at me like I don’t belong.”
- “Here’s the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do.”
- “Sometimes I thought the only way he could deal with it was to pretend he could see none of it.”
- “... as I sat there, I found myself thinking of things I hadn’t thought of for years, old emotions washing over me, new thoughts and ideas being pulled from me as if my perception itself were being stretched out of shape.”
- “I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted.”
- “Or are you just so used to people giving you stuff that you don’t feel you have to?”
- “I had been having trouble sleeping, and had found that actually getting up was marginally preferable to lying in my bed batting away the swirling mess of my thoughts.”
- “I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, if you’re stuck in one of these, all you have are the places in your memory that you can go to.”
- “There was something curiously restful about watching the rest of the world getting on with its business.”
- “I realized I didn’t feel any better for having told her, to have passed my own heightened anxiety on to her – but what choice did I have?”
- “But when I think about how much worse it could get – some nights I lie in my bed and I can’t actually breathe.”
- “And you know what? Nobody wants to hear that stuff. Nobody wants you to talk about being afraid, or in pain, or being scared of dying through some stupid, random infection.”
- “The tears left me silently, and told me something else was leaving me. Guilt. Fear. A few other things I hadn’t yet found words for.”
- “Some mistakes … just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let that night be the thing that defines you.”
- “Time seemed to have stretched and become meaningless,”
- “And that’s something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to. You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously. You all expect to live the lives you chose. Especially a successful young man like yourself. But it takes time.”
- “... and there was something about the sight of him being briefly happy that repelled those people who might otherwise have looked at him askance, or offered pitying glances.”
- “He could be happy, if surrounded by the right people,”
- “Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.”
- “I don’t know what I was telling him. I don’t know where it all came from. I just knew if I didn’t get him to say yes tonight, ... then I had no chance at all.”
- “It feels like I might be running, but I feel like I’m permanently just a little bit behind the rest of the field.”
- “... my sadness was never the crippling thing I should have expected.”
- “But if we don’t have faith that he can feel better, even get better, then how is he supposed to keep the faith that good things might happen?”
- “But I want him to live if he wants to live. If he doesn’t, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me – no matter how much we love him – we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices.”
- “... but I was happiest just hanging around next to him.”
- “I think we can do all sorts of things. I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do.”
- “His eyes searched my own, and there was this huge weight of sadness within them.”
- “I know we can do this. I know it’s not how you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.”
- “It’s not enough for me. This – my world – even with you in it. And believe me, Clark, my whole life has changed for the better since you came. But it’s not enough for me.”
- “I am not designed to exist in this thing – and yet for all intents and purposes it is now the thing that defines me. It is the only thing that defines me.”
- “And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me.”
- “So I’m asking you – if you feel the things you say you feel – then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I’m hoping for.”
- “You have made that time more precious than you can imagine. You stopped it being an endurance test”
- “I couldn’t bear the thought that I would lose him, that he was so stubborn, and determined not to see what was good, what could be good, that he would not change his mind.”
- “... and because what has been the worst thing for him has been losing the ability to make a single decision, to do a single thing for himself …”
- “My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it.”
- “Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury.”
feb 20 2016 ∞
feb 20 2016 +