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...
And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.
And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling . . . even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was...
You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while...
Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.
It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.
If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if To...
I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn'...
I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.
I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian's unfinished sentence: 'So, for instance, if Tony . . .' I knew I couldn't change, or mend, anything now.
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.
He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.
Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Som...
But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens—of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass—this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it.
But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.
But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feeli...
Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.
Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .
And one other thing: don't ask me about the weather. I don't much remember what the weather has been like during my life. True, I can remember how hot sun gave greater impetus to sex; how sudden snow...
And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.
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