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Kindle Notes & Highlights
He was lean, handsome, daring, the sort of man who looked straight ahead but stayed open to laughter.
The youth of her body moving in the white of the dressing gown.
A terrible thing, to forget a man’s name.
The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart’s deep need for instruction.
The rooms led into one another like fabulous sentences.
No power can imprison what is good and right.
There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise.
The birds woke furious with dawn.
He can already feel the weight of the days ahead, the changed minds, the semantical shuffling, the nervous search for equilibrium.
The fatal laws of our own importance.
Still, he was sure some of them wanted a slice of anger from him. To stumble somehow. To say the wrong thing. So they could apportion the blame away from themselves. But he figured out ways to fade into the background, stuck to silence, looked over the rim of his glasses. He disliked his own importance in the process.
He is not sure if it’s a trick or not, but he likes the ritual.
He could be cynical tomorrow: always time for that.
I do not find it sentimental at all, no, never, not that. Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
She wishes Ambrose wouldn’t worry so much, that she could coax a longer laugh out of him, that he would rise from the desk and leave it behind, if only for a moment or two, but he is a secret worrier.
Quite frankly, my dear, you look late.
how very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.
Our ancient hatreds don’t deserve capital letters.
They moved generously around each other, nothing false or cloying.
