Shirley > Recent Status Updates

"And although he tried every day to remember the promise he'd made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he'd read long ago."

"There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault."

"Die Fragen nach dem Leben selbst sind am allerschwersten zu beantworten."

"Die Angst kommt nicht vom Verlorenen. [...] Das Verlorene ist bereits hinter geschlossenen Türen. Die Angst kommt vom dem was noch verloren gehen kann. Vielleicht sehen Sie nichts, das noch verloren gehen kann. Noch gibt es keinen Tag ihres Lebens, an dem ich sie nicht sehe."

"Wenn wir [...] an das Kinderhaben [denken], betrachten wir es vor allem als einen Segen. Wir sparen den Augenblick des plötzlichen Fröstelns aus, jenes was wäre wenn, den freien Fall ins unvermeidliche Versagen. Was wenn ich darin versage, mich um dieses Baby zu kümmern? Was wenn dieses Baby nicht gedeiht, was wenn dieses Baby mich nicht liebt? Und schlimmer noch [...]: Was, wenn ich dieses Baby nicht liebe?"

"Theoretisch dienen diese Andenken dazu, den Augenblick zurückzurufen. Tatsächlich dienen sie nur dazu, mir zu verdeutlichen, wie wenig ich den Augenblick genoss, als er da war."

"Beachten Sie: Wir zählten Freude und Gesundheit, Liebe, Glück und schöne Kinder noch zu den 'gewöhnlichen Wünschen'."

"Die Zeit vergeht. Könnte es sein, dass ich das nie geglaubt habe? Hatte ich geglaubt, die blauen Stunden würden für immer andauern?"

"Das Leben ging weiter. Die einen trennten sich, die anderen heirateten."

"Ich sterbe, antwortete sie. Ich gehe nach Hause. Ich kehre dorthin zurück, wo ich hergekommen bin - das ist meine Heimkehr."

"Was für ein Leben (wenn man es so nennen kann), was für ein Bild der Welt, was für ein Selbst kann sich ein Mensch bewahren, der den größten Teil seiner Erinnerung und damit seine Vergangenheit, seinen Ankerplatz im Meer der Zeit, verloren hat?"

"Wir waren eins. Ich lebte aufrecht und ruhig wie der Eukalyptus. Die Arme in den Schultern verankert, beide Beine fest auf dem Boden. Und in dem Augenblick, als sie starb...da bin ich zerfallen. Als hätte man mich in kleine Stücke zerschlagen und die dann weggeworfen."

"Aber was ist schon ein Bild ohne den Zauber des Blicks und der Stimme und der Art zu reden?"

"...love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm."

"Real generosity, he recognizes, means admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence, and walking away."

"Our romantic lives are fated to be sad. And incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is [...] our naive hope [...] that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite Sex with tenderness and passion with routine."

"It makes him feel a little lonely to realize how easy it is to be liked by someone who has no idea who he is."

"The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple - which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task: misery is experienced subjectively, and there is always a temptation for each party to form a sincere yet competitive conviction that, in truth, his or her life is more cursed..."

"Sexual desire is driven by a wish to establish closeness - and is hence contingent on a pre-existing sense of distance, which it is perpetually a distinctive pleasure and relief to try to bridge."

"It's not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are - beneath the bluster - intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful, and in search of consolation. [...] We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers."

"How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships - if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love."

"The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior."

"Children teach us that love is, in its purest Form, a kind of service. [...] They teach us to give without expecting anything in return."

"Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused in a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love."

"We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane."

"The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride."

"We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we have all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed."

"We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love."

"At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one."

"That it is 'unnecessary' in the practical sense to marry serves only to render the idea more compelling emotionally. Being married may be associated with caution, conservatism, and timidity, but getting married is an altogether different, more reckless, and therefore more appealingly Romantic proposition."