Isabelle the Navigator Quotes

“You're beautiful, but you're somewhere else. That's okay. I can handle that. But we won't continue as friends, not just now. I like you as a lover, not a friend.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“If time stood still, and
we could choose the
time, the best time,
then love without
pain would be all I
know.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Very quickly I begin to understand the selfishness of my love, the inappropriateness of my relationships, when I realise that every time I fuck it feels as if I am wrestling with demons.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“I learnt too late that what is most important to us is always most precious at the moment it occurs, and it is precious in its absolute immediacy and not as some vague confirmation of future directions; since the only certain fact, aside from death, is the flimsiness of everything.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“In the presence of their love I sensed my lonliness, and I understood for a moment, clearly, that deep and basic human desire for companionship at depth.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“If I could find someone to blame, perhaps I could get angry. Anything would be better than this sadness, this sense of regret for events that were never mine.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Was it possible to feel love with an empty mind? For if the mind was empty, then it was empty of love too.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“She told herself that life is short. This didn't mean that nothing mattered, only that when strange things happened there was often no turning back.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“That's all that faith is, the knowledge that the greater thing is with you. That's all the faith you need. The knowledge that you are not the greater thing.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“What is love, in the beginning, if not this mapping out, this settling into the other's undulations?”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It was all about eyes, the truth.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It's just that you reach a point where metaphors become indistinguishable from the things they represent. And the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. And it feels like being born”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“The very concept of solid ground is a myth. The galaxy itself is adrift.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“I understand only that a vast void, an emptiness, is needing to be filled. O the things we grasp at.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Not only good to be alive, but nice to come with a stranger. Intimacy? For now I want nothing of it. I am simply trying to emerge from the violent unnecessariness of death.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It is so exquisitely funny and sad, the way we view each other; how very little, despite our best efforts, we communicate.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“I would feel deeply the elegant satisfaction of being caressed by that gawky boy, and I would take his face in both my hands and kiss him hard, as if I could draw from those lips the very strength and sweetness he did not know he had.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“What everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the streeet, is the one obvious point: 'future corpse, future corpse.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“When you talk about love, and family, invariably too you are talking about compassion. This would include the notion that we are all just lumped together, and tolerance is a virtue.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“His eyes are huge and black. I think about desire. There are flickerings that occur, and we know very little about them. Millimetres of dilation are words in a language.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Always, everywhere, the world is filled with collisions.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“For every gain there is a sacrifice, and the removal of the parasite sometimes entails removal of the host.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator