The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.
The mess that's emerging...at least reflects the truth of my experience, the fact that every contemplation is interrupted, and that every interruption becomes further object of contemplation, and that...
Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met) could have
No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it's cherished
Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.
Life imitating bad literary criticism. Dis/inte/gration.
In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right.
He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.
But that's what the English mean, isn't it, when they say, He was very philosophical about it? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.
An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.
Fall apart
There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it....
So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste.
Mind you, I don’t know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth. -...
Maybe they are intended to be images about emptiness,’ said the man solemnly. ‘I think that’s something the kids are very much in touch with right now.’ ‘How can you be in touch with emptiness?’ asked...
Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.
Either I wake up in the Grey Zone,’ he whispered, ‘and I’ve forgotten how to breathe, and my feet are so far away I’m not sure I can afford the air fare;
Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her per...
Above all, she was a baby, not a 'big baby' like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.
What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.