She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.
She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.
Patrick’s own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother’s said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole....
Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they...
It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.
If you were madly in love, you’d want me to win,’ said Katherine.‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Sam. ‘I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacr...
I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,’ said Patrick. ‘The rest is packaging.
How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.
Eleanor had watched her mother’s persecution with the same vivid silence as she experienced in the face of her own gradual disintegration tonight.
At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.
What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?
There's a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.
The trouble with not being a psychopath. Every avenue was blocked.
She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral,
She imagined vodka poured over ice and all the cubes that had been frosted turning clean and collapsing in the glass and the ice cracking, like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath.
Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.’ ‘You
Og likevel kjente Patrick at han var trukket mot sin fars død av en sterkere tilbøyelighet til å ta etter ham, enn han var i stand til å holde ut. Døden var selvsagt alltid en fristelse; men nå virket...
Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.
No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a ha...
Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in o...