- He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
- She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.
- Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
- So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love—loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.
- They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
- Aren't we so terribly lucky to have one another?
- Sentences became words became sighs became groans became grunts became light.
- For how long could we fail until we surrendered?
- As with Father, there are only so many times that you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.
- This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
- He once thought that the earth was the center of the universe, but learned better.
- Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening.
- What? she said once to, herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much—so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins—without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?
- They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them. Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious—not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breathe of a drowning victim.
- The hole is no void; the void exists around it.
- With writing, we have second chances.
- With my silence, I game him a space to fill.
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- "You are very funny, Jonathan."
- "No. That's the last thing I want to be."
- "Why? TO be funny is a great thing."
- "No it's not."
- "Why is this?"
- "I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. You know what I mean?"
- "Yes, of course."
- "But now I think it's the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world."
- The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
sep 1 2013 ∞
sep 2 2013 +
sep 2 2013 +