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What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.
When everything slips through your fingers, you learn to savor the feel of nice things against your palm.
Loves the smell of books, and the steady weight of them on shelves, the presence of old titles and the arrival of new ones and the fact that in a city like New York, there will always be readers.
she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing.
So she longs for the
mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.
For home. For a place where the stars were so bright they formed a river, a stream of silver and purple light against the dark.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
For every shadow, there must be light.
“they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”
She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it.
Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.
“Names have purpose. Names have power.”
Date. The word thrills through her. A date is something made, something planned; not a chance of opportunity, but time set aside at one point for another, a moment in the future.
Their bodies press and move together, and she wishes she could erase those other men, those other nights, their stale breath and awkward bulk, the dull thrusts that ended in a sudden, abrupt spasm, before they pulled out, pulled away. To them, wet was wet, and warm was warm, and she was nothing but a vessel for their pleasure.
So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.
This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.
do not want a master, and I’ve yet to find an equal.”
But ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.”
His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.
you haven’t been you. You waste so much time on people who don’t deserve you. People who don’t know you, because you don’t let them know you.”
you’re smart, and kind, and infuriating. You hate olives and people who talk during movies. You love milkshakes and people who can laugh until they cry. You think it’s a crime to turn ahead to the end of a book. When you’re angry you get quiet, and when you’re sad you get loud, and you hum when you’re happy.”
feels good to be the user instead of the used. To be the one who gets instead of the one who loses.
“art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”
that’s how memories are supposed to work. There—and then, little by little, gone.
Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps—perhaps—they are in reach.
They’ve been lucky, so lucky, but the trouble with luck is that it always ends.
And perhaps it is just the moonless sky. And perhaps it is just that happiness is frightening.
“The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”
fear belongs to those with more to lose.
Humans are capable of such wondrous things. Of cruelty, and war, but also art and invention. She will think this again and again over the years, when bombs are dropped, and buildings felled, when terror consumes whole countries.
