- "Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."
- I slept until sleep seemed like waking and waking like sleep.
- That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones.
- I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily that anyone could imagine.
- Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
- Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.
- "But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?"
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- "Why couldn't you just have loved her more?" I said.
- His hand dropped down. He shook his head. Nobody knew why. Nobody ever knew why.
- People just wanted to be loved. That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific— chair, eye, stone —but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings.
- I sure wasn't going to let myself get disappointed again. I never let anyone touch me. Damn straight.
- Why couldn't anybody ever hang on to anything?
- Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that is sounded good.
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- "Do you ever regret what you've done?"
- The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. "You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine."
sep 9 2014 ∞
sep 23 2014 +
sep 23 2014 +