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He once read a science fiction novel called The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He doesn’t know about the moon, but would testify in court that whiskey is a harsh mistress, and that’s made right here on earth.
She does these morning chores without once thinking You must not forget to, except someplace down deep she is thinking it, and always will. The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.
Little by little, doubt crept in. And resentment, doubt’s fraternal twin.
“Okay.” Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.
was in my twenties. I took stronger pills, but still not enough to do the job and part of me knew that. I was very unstable back then, but I wasn’t stupid, and the part that wasn’t stupid wanted to live.
“The reasons never matter, because suicide goes against every human instinct, and that makes it insane.”
and I’m afraid that voice may never go away and my life will be spoiled.” “You have to strangle it.” Holly speaks with dry, detached certainty.
“Yes. You have to choke that voice until it’s dead. It’s the first job. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t get better. And if you can’t get better, you can’t make anything else better.”
Hodges is silent, thinking hard—maybe as hard as ever in his life. He learned the phrase to cross the Rubicon way back in high school, and grasped its meaning without Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared.
Four in the morning is usually an unhappy time to be awake. It’s when unpleasant thoughts and pessimistic ideas come to the fore,
“Are you happy, Ellen?” “I used to be,” she says. “I could be again, if I find the right numbers.” Brady gives her a smile that’s both sad and charming. “Yes, but the numbers are like life,” he says. “Nothing adds up, Ellen. Isn’t that true?”
He began to understand what contentment actually was: the emotional version of the horse latitudes, where all the winds died away and one simply drifted. It ensued when one ran out of goals to grow.
Now he understands why pancreatic is called the stealth cancer, and why it’s almost always deadly. It lurks, building up its troops and sending out secret emissaries to the lungs, the lymph nodes, the bones, and the brain. Then it blitzkriegs, not understanding, in its stupid rapacity, that victory can only bring its own death. Hodges thinks, Except maybe that’s what it wants. Maybe it’s self-hating, born with a desire not to murder the host but to kill itself. Which makes cancer the real suicide prince.
It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
