Lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain....
Even when I couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it wa...
Doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.
But now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
But ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people e...
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
Whe can't escape who we are
Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves our of despair.
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I’d ever said came back...
Well the Dutch invented the microscope, she said. They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flie...
Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanishe...
They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.
There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction.
The space behind me in the frame was not so much a space in the conventional sense as a perfectly composed harmony, a wider, more real-seeming reality with a deep silence around it, beyond sound and s...
The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, career, marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest...
The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox a hundred times. [...] You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real gr...
The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a s...