Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's...
And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.
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...
Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.
Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.
That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.
When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.
The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it a...
Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
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...
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...
He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.
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.
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.
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...
Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I 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.
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.
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