Shirley > Recent Status Updates

"My wife and I have role-played ourselves into the adults we are today. We're role-playing what it would be like if two people who married young and had grown apart still lived together pretending that their marriage was real."

Each of us is given second chances every day of our lives. They are there for the taking, it's just that we don't usually take them.

"Eine richtige Frau [...] kennt ihre Waffen. Sie weiß sie zu gebrauchen. Sie ist sich ihrer Wirkung bewusst. Alle ihre Pfeile hat sie auf die zuckende Zielscheibe [...] abgeschossen. Alle Pfeile haben ins Schwarze getroffen. Allesamt sitzen sie nun mit ihren Widerhaken im Herzen des Mannes, des geliebten Feindes, fest."

Es gibt ja so viel zu erzählen, zu fragen und zu beantworten, wenn zwei kleine Mädchen erst einmal Freundinnen geworden sind!

Vom Waffenstillstand zum Frieden ist es ein weiter Weg.

"Schließlich ist der Tod für den gut vorbereiteten Geist nur das nächste große Abenteuer. Weißt du, eigentlich war der Stein gar nichts so Wundervolles. Geld und Leben, so viel du dir wünscht! Die beiden Dinge, welche die meisten Menschen allem anderen vorziehen würden - das Problem ist, die Menschen haben den Hang, genau das zu wählen, was am schlechtesten für sie ist. "

"Die Wahrheit. [...] Das ist etwas Schönes und Schreckliches und sollte daher mit großer Umsicht behandelt werden."

"She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water."

"He loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become. [...] He had tried to imagine her as an adult but had invented someone with qualities moulded out of her community. Not this wonderful stranger he could love more deeply because she was made up of nothing he had provided."

"He is familiar with her breath when he places his face against her body, at the clavicle, where the bone lightens the skin. But if she asked him what colour her eyes are, although he has come to adore her, he will not, she thinks, be able to say. [...] He may look intently at eyes but not register what colour they are, the way food already in his throat or stomach is just texture more than taste or specific object."

"In der Unschlüssigkeit, der verweilenden, unabgeschlossenen Geste, in der Trägheit tun sich Zustände der Sammlung auf. Dieses nicht effiziente, abirrende, irgendwie ausgesetzte Verhalten zur Welt [...], dieses desorientierte, sich selbst überlassene Treiben ist im Kern poetisch, aus der Zeit gefallen und deshalb geeignet, ihre Betrachtung aus der Halbdistanz zu stimulieren."

"Wir waren jene, die wussten, aber nicht verstanden, die begriffen, aber sich nicht vergegenwärtigen konnten, voller Informationen, aber ohne Erkenntnis, randvoll mit Wissen, aber mager an Erfahrung. So gingen wir, nicht aufgehalten von uns selbst."

"Aber ist das nicht vielleicht das Wesen der Vernunft, dass sie sich nachzeitig formiert und in Modulen? Und war sie so oder musste sie so werden in der Folge einer Anpassungsleistung an die dauernd veränderten Bedingungen unseres Lebens?"

"So laufen wir uns hinterher, nicht voraus, sind also in diesem Moment gleichzeitig die, die wir gewesen sein werden, und ebenfalls jene, die nicht in der Lage sind, auf die eigene Höhe zu gelangen."

"Half of my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn't matter if I ever see you again. It isn't the morality, it is how much you can bear."

"She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a carnival."

"There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own."

"But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others."

"And afterwards he kept thinking of the girl that afternoon, suddenly terrified for her, angry at her for involving herself. [...] And now he was here, the candlelight swaying, altering her look so he could not tell what she thought. Wisdom or sadness or curiosity."

"If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world."

"A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing - not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past."

"...you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds [...] Think about the speed of his pen."

"She peered into her look, trying to recognize herself."

"She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."

"I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking at the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of preoccupation."

"She's idealizing adolescence. That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been like that."

"A year ago, they'd still linked, inexorably and, they'd thought, forever. It was supposedly better this way - each of them had found her heart's desire - but did they laugh as they had done for so many years? Would they ever laugh that way again, or was it over, now, in the Realm of Adult Sobriety?"

"I measure my life out in books.
You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?"

"I look at them [once read books] and wonder who I was, you know? It's a long time ago."

"They were not alone at the table, or in the world. Ordinary as it was, the recognition pained her - she didn't want to admit the ordinary - and released her."