Turtle Diary

by Russell Hoban

Their eyes said nothing, the thousands of miles of ocean couldn’t be said.

The gorilla lay on his stomach in his cell, his chin resting on his folded arms. No. I couldn’t think which was worse: if he could remember or if he couldn’t.

children. I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and I don’t keep cats.

There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don’t see them any more.

I had sort of a bursting feeling as if my self were a wall round me that I couldn’t knock down or climb over.

The Zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it.

I’m always afraid of being lost, the secret navigational art of the turtles seems a sacred thing to me.

What a weird thing smoking is and I can’t stop it. I feel cosy, have a sense of well-being when I’m smoking, poisoning myself, killing myself slowly. Not so slowly maybe.

But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself. Very good. Wonderful.

It’s those times that all the other times are in between. It’s time when nothing helps and the great heavy boot of the past is planted squarely in your back and shoving you forward.

Sundays are dangerous, the quiet waits in ambush.

It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.

I’m less reasonable than I was when young.

All at once I felt a strong urge to talk to her for hours and hours about everything. And at the same time I felt an urge not to talk to her at all.

Me, what’s that after all?

She spoke as if she’d come a long way from wherever she’d been in her mind and couldn’t stop long.

It was as if he found himself always in strange houses looking out of the windows of rooms in which nothing was his.

but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

We’ve too much in common for us to be comfortable in each other’s presence for very long.

Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.

Maybe I’m just one of those people so accustomed to being miserable that they use the material of any situation to fuel their misery.

My heart was pounding somewhat and I found myself mentally rehearsing what I would say. I always do that, I can’t help it.

At least I assume she’s alone. She looks as if she’s always been alone. Of course I’m seeing her out of alone eyes, I could well be wrong.

I don’t want to be naked with anybody now, especially myself.

With smoking one has a life while dying.

In myself like a prisoner. But not into my self.

I don’t want to do anything particularly.

There, I’m worrying about him. I’ve breached my privacy badly. There’s not enough of me for that, I have no self to spare.

You try to kill some aspect of the intolerable and you kill the gentle and the good as well.

No, it isn’t just the bird, it’s the distance, the wideness. I am so unquiet.

It was cosy going to her place on Saturday night, walking under the street lamps looking up at lighted windows and knowing that I too had a lighted window waiting where I shouldn’t be alone.

Everything happens in the same world, that’s why life is so difficult.

He was talking to me in a matter-of-fact way as if I really existed and was a real grown-up person who could drive vans, be at a certain place at a certain time and do what I’d undertaken to do. Incredible.

He spoke as if it was all really real and we were real people who were simply going to go ahead and do what we’d said we’d do.

I looked at the telephone after I’d put it down. Sly thing, getting words out of me I’d no intention of saying.

I don’t know, I think we have too much in common. We’re not complementary, she doesn’t fill in the blanks in me nor I in her. Both afraid of the same things maybe. We don’t fit together. What if we did?

on. Just let go of the terror, don’t hold on to the terror. Simple if only I could remember that.

I was feeling all right, smoking a cigarette and craving another cigarette at the same time but holding on to nothing else.

If I can possibly miss the fun in life I’ll do it.

There was something insulting about it, like having a man continually call you by the name of the woman he used to be with.

‘In-between is really where I feel best. Neither here nor there.’

if the tide was in the ocean was with us and our venture would prosper, if it was out it meant that things were no different from the way they always were, just a lot of damned bother and aggravation.

headland. The champagne tasted like clear and bubbling bright new mornings without end.

My mind turned away from everything all at once. I realized at that moment that the end of all things need not be difficult. No effort of any kind, just a turning away by whatever means might come to hand.

Not for me at all. On the other hand what was. For anybody. Nothing really.

Five hundred and fifteen miles without a dent or a scratch! I was tremendously impressed by that. The shape of the van was so different from the shape of me and my life, how had we managed to stick together without hitting anything for all those miles!

A grey and dreary morning with no hope in it. Things would always be the way they were, it said.

Sunny days have always been more difficult for me than grey ones.

I’d never know if they’d got there or not, for me they would always be swimming.

I wished I had somewhere to go besides my flat. Somewhere bright and empty with uncluttered shadows, somewhere not crusted with years of me.