Jake

“If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person—inevitably the person closest to us—and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“He lay on the bed and he felt he might never rise from it. He lay in an enormous torpor. The world was too heavy to bear and it was settling itself onto his chest. He felt old, old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the brief time that he had lived. He felt that when the old man's head exploded across the snow he should have turned the gun on himself.”
― William Gay, Provinces of Night

“I had asked Hunter once, when he was in a rare calm mood, 'Do you know when you're about to change? Are you aware of it?' Hunter said, 'Sandy, do you know what it's like? I'm just standing here, and I have a sense that something is about to happen. And then I start to turn my head, and it's here. The monster's here.”
― Jann S. Wenner, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

“We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.


I will stop hearing her breathing.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers