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“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?” he said, looking round the table. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more
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“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue.
Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia.
Now I cut my eyes away whenever we met. (The gentleman’s way out, as my classmates used to joke.)
There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulder which I, a veteran of many sleepless nights, recognized immediately.
I became expert at making myself invisible. I could linger two hours over a coffee, four over a meal, and hardly be noticed by the waitress.
Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently.
It’s more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one’s surprise—in an entirely different world.
A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.
“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.
it made me feel better in some obscure way: imagining myself a hero, rushing fearlessly for the gun, instead of merely loitering in the bullet’s path like the bystander which I so essentially am.
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star …
