We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rathe...
We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and addin...
We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versi...
Viver sozinho tem momentos de auto-comiseração e paranóia.
To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.
Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.
Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art exhibition) that we went to together. The last wine she drank, the last clothe...
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents- were they the stuff of Literature?
Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothin...
There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to...
Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but...
The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but...
The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.
The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopp...
The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don’t believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not near...
The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas whe...
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connectio...
The heap of dirty dishes was normal for Arthur, who had applied for a reduction in his water rate on the grounds that he washed up only every fortnight, and then used the leftover liquid for watering...