More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And yet the fact that I had been included, that my father had casually asked me to share his boredom with him, nearly crushed me with happiness.
You could not trust him to know what you wanted, to anticipate what you might have been feeling. The fact that you had to tell him yourself vitiated the pleasure in advance, disrupted a dreamed-of harmony before a note could be played.
By the time you had managed to establish a common ground with him, he would take out his shovel and dig it out from under your feet.
I chanced upon these words from a letter by Van Gogh: ‘Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of stone or iron, like a hydrant or a lamp-post.’
In those crazy, tensed-up moods he sometimes got into, he would always come out with bizarre opinions, not really taking them seriously, but happy to play devil’s advocate in order to keep things lively.
I have a sense of trying to go somewhere, as if I knew what I wanted to say, but the farther I go the more certain I am that the path towards my object does not exist. I have to invent the road with each step, and this means that I can never be sure of where I am.
Having money means more than being able to buy things: it means that the world need never affect you. Money in the sense of protection, then, not pleasure.
He was not trying to buy happiness, but simply an absence of unhappiness.
he did not get angry at me or make fun of me. He laughed, but in a way that made me laugh too.
In spite of the excuses I have made for myself, I understand what is happening. The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way delude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, that the better part of my story still lies ahead.
‘In the presence of extraordinary reality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.’
For it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth – assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak – it comes from the mouth of a woman.
