More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I think that in the first three months after my misadventure, my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown.
This story is proof that writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
Later—around the time I was starting to see the last three or four months of our marriage in a clearer light, as a matter of fact—I began to understand that my decision to quit smoking when I did was perhaps not so unconsidered as it at first seemed, and a very long way from ill-considered. I’m not a brilliant man, not a brave one, either, but that decision might have been both. It’s certainly possible; sometimes we rise above ourselves. In any case, it gave my mind something concrete to pitch upon in the days after Diane left; it gave my misery a vocabulary it would not otherwise have had.
None of us can predict the final outcomes of our actions, and few of us even try; most of us just do what we do to prolong a moment’s pleasure or to stop the pain. And even when we act for the noblest reasons, the last link of the chain all too often drips with someone’s blood.
