The hat-check girl wore her hair in a schoolgirl pageboy so you were meant to think of Dorothy Collins – all innocence, wide-eyed and breathless – but this was mock-innocent and she knew her business,...
The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you’re safe.
The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By
Suicide is in fact a consoling thought. Suicide is the secret door by which you can exit the world at any time—it’s wholly up to you. For who can prevent you, if suicide is truly your wish? Who has th...
She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception of her, and love of her.
Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.
Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.
Our lives are Mobius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.
Not hearing impaired but just not hearing which is a way of not caring.)
No one would be able to name what had happened or would wish to name it. Rape was a word that came not be spoken at High Point Farm.
Maybe he’d been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it’s always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others.
Love is what can’t be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes. Love is what happens when you’ve been looking another way. Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself i...
I’d rather be truth-telling and I hope always to be without hypocrisy.
It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-gove...
It had given him a charge of entitlement and invincibility he would draw upon through life, like a limitless bank account.)
In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that’s a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the...
In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?
If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.
I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, why write at such length about it? I could understand [his] attraction to s...
He’d never risk his life if he could avoid it. I’d rather live, thank you. In