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if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely.
The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.”
Back in the Castle, we avoided one another, slunk into corners, and muttered our lines to ourselves, like the inmates of a lunatic asylum.
One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.
over the years I’d insulated myself from the rest of the house (the rest of the neighborhood, the rest of Ohio) with layers of ink and paper and poetry, like a squirrel lining a nest.
“Our sheer capacity for feeling got to be so unwieldy that we staggered under it, like Atlas with the weight of the world.”
In that one brief moment, I actually wondered if “okay” or something like it might still be possible. But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.
