He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.
Mes baigėme mokyklą, pasižadėjome draugauti visą gyvenimą ir nuėjome skirtingais keliais
He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. In...
But I was wrong about most things, then as now.
Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect...
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, lat...
Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; ho...
My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pag...
آیا چیزی باورپذیرتر از عقربه ثانیه شما وجود داد؟ و باوجوداین، کوچکترین لذت یا دردی کافی است که انعطافپذیری زمان را بهمان بیاموزد.
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such bana...
Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, eithe...
Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.
You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.
Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There...
But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.
What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is str...
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.