Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter, as witness the pagan elements in medieval Christianity and the evolution of the Russian "K...
Humanity is so adaptable [...] Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, ...
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover....
Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
