Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?
What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of ex...
Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?
A face like a crème brûlée after the first blow of the spoon,
No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.
This time he was going to fall apart silently.
He found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot f...
All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David’s excuse, she wondered.
He thought of one of the guiding mottoes of his father’s life: ‘Never apologize, never explain.
People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.
The two men left the building with a sense of achievement, counterbalanced by desire.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Like a man walking backwards along a path, erasing his footsteps with a broom, he had tried, through contradiction, negation, paradox, unreliable narration and every other method he could devise, to c...
He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two,...
And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.
There was definitely an argument for getting some sleep; namely, that when he woke up the impact of the drugs would be stronger.
That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of magazine.
Rome wasn’t deconstructed in a day.
But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn’t all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn’t have been the real thing.
At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.