- I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment.
- How many times could you give up on someone you loved?
- She felt like her words echoed in the silence, and hated being stuck with them for so long.
- She is my doing and my undoing. She always had been. And what a price she paid for it, too.
- The loneliness of it was unbearable sometimes.
- And yet the river flowed. It cleansed itself and forgot. How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn't forget?
- I know that suffering doesn't end with death.
- If you worried you were crazy, was that any indication that you were not crazy? Or less crazy?
- The soul is a mysterious thing.
- Even if she was only an idea, the idea was comfort.
- She mostly avoided parties of old high school people. They had a depressing air of unearned nostalgia. Kind of like reunions but premature, where no one had gone out and done anything yet.
- You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.
- I didn't want her to think I need anything from her. I didn't want her to be afraid. I didn't know how close or how far to be. How much talking was burdensome? How much silence was lonely? How much attention was unsettling? How little attention was cold? I wanted her to know she was safe with me. She yawned and I wondered. She slept, and I watched over her.
- There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through a lot of empty years, me more than most. You have to make them last as well as you can.
- He hoped to see her. How was the thing you picked to happen, and fear was the thing you picked not to happen, and often with him they blurred.
- It was a strange source of loneliness, knowing things about people they didn't know themselves.
- I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.
- There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn't work the way you or most other people thought it did.
- Maybe they would stop and look at each other and feel some odd yearning, but neither of them would know why. They would want to stop, but they would be embarrassed, and neither would know what to say. The would go their separate ways. Who knew? Maybe that happened every day to people who'd once loved each other. It seemed inexpressibly bleak to have a tragedy you couldn't even recognize.
- It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.
- You remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.
- He kissed her with everything, because loving a person was all you could do.
- Damaged people did strange things.
- Thoughts were nothing. Memories were nothing. They were nothing you could touch. They took no time. You could fit them all on the point of a pin. You could bring your entire world into doubt in a span of a few seconds.
- You couldn't just let the world happen to you.
sep 1 2013 ∞
sep 1 2013 +
sep 1 2013 +