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WHAT LIES BEHIND US AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US ARE TINY MATTERS COMPARED TO WHAT LIES WITHIN US. ~ EMERSON.
read and reread and underscored in pencil to the point that every line appears profound.
A hundred thousand tragedies played out in the spring of 1865.
Bad, angry decisions left behind a huge cost in life and suffering for the entire nation. And utter loss of wealth for the South.
The moment forces decision. Wait, and risk choices disappearing forever.
Whether you pick well or poorly, the act of choosing carries grief. Leaves you wondering, years later, what life might have been had you chosen differently.
Back before she realized everybody was racing for money and fame and power.
These days, she tries to be gentle with her young self.
Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.
He saw the French language as a tool, a weapon, rather than a portal into a culture and its history and literature.
Back then, a good marriage didn’t require love. A good marriage meant security—money and position and a man who didn’t knock you around.
All they saw of Petersburg was the wrecked landscape of a lost war.
The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. And also maybe something about the great reluctance with which we let go of our belief in a just God.
She thought about how the flow of morphine through the human organism always carries with it so much clarity, so much objectivity.
no one knows the inside of a marriage except the two people impounded together.
and nobody can trust a word they say to anyone.
be honest—name a marriage of equals without murderous thoughts now and then.
Fame. All it means is, people who don’t know one true thing about you get to have opinions and feel entitled to aim their screeds your way.
every morning V wrote three lists on separate pages of hotel stationery. A page for things in the dreams she resented and didn’t wish to see or think of ever again—things consigned to the burn pile. Another page for things she still liked but had no room for in her mind or her life. And last, a short list of precious things she missed and hoped existed somewhere in the world whether she saw them again or not. Each night before bed she burned all three pages in the fireplace.
