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Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self.
There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing.
Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.
Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always.
Her biggest worry was that Orin was pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy’d warned her the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out.
Even as an undergrad Joelle’d been convinced that parodists were no better than camp-followers in ironic masks, satires usually the work of people with nothing new themselves to say.
Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only because the boy had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual silence,
We’re all a lot more intuitive about our lovers’ families than we are about our own families, she knew.
The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive.
‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’
‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’
their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.’
I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell.
‘You should make your voice lower, for in the hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, coming in for quiet.’
‘You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted
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The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain,
the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.
if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me.
This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.
These types were Gately’s first exposure to the concept of real addiction and what it can turn someone into; he hadn’t yet connected the concept to drugs really, except coke-heads and hardcore needle-jockeys, who at that point all seemed to him just as furtive and pathetic as the gambling-addicts, in their own way.
Gately realized he could more than empathize with Fackelmann’s flight into Dilaudid and M&M’s, but he now realizes that that was the first time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.
The insight that most people like play-danger but don’t like real-life danger hit Gately like an epiphany.
Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn’t much interest entertainment-film audiences, though,
Watt for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen.
DeLint described winter sports as practically getting down on one knee and begging for an injury.
LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN
It is hard to notice what you see every day.
The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.
Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he’d personally prefer that Orin wait until he’d found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that he’d wait until he’d experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was
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Who, finally, can say the whys and whences of each man’s true vocation?
It’s not clear whether the verminousness of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him.
He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down her shirt and spell attic.
never try and pull a weight that exceeds you.
‘The truth will set you free, but not until it’s done with you.’
It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it.
