It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.
It's about fear. You know! They're all throbbing with fear. We all are.... Bits of it floating in the air. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all...
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it...
If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?
If you start forgetting you’re already lost.
I will always wonder what it was, what that moment of beauty was, when he whispered it to me, when we found him smashed up in the hospital, what it was he was saying when he whispered into the dark th...
I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.
I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story.
I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen--how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.
He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity
He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground.
Good days, they come around the oddest corners.
Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said,...
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
Claire wants to say: Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is s...
But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely.
Bits of it floating in the air, he said. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You tou...
Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.