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The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.
It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them.
Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.
After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.
Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.
Even gibberish is dangerous, silence is better.
In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden.
It was suddenly difficult to speak, as if every word was a little lump of mud in my mouth.
For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.
The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.
It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.
it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.
