To see how pretty an old woman once was, it is not enough just to look at each feature; they must be translated.
But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;
...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.
How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.
I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.
His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.
One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock.
We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.
Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all conclusions it entails.
Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.
Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
...he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called 'strange.' A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.
A sense of mission lost in ink's jagged outcrops. I was trying to tell myself what I must have known before in a form I wouldn't recognize at first.
You have a great heart, but will only find it to be so through great pain. This is the wisdom of love, and its doubtful gift. . . . I have endured much suffering and still remain unbitter and unclosed.
When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.
