basic quotations

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

It came to her just before sleep, an idea crystallizing in the dark—how maybe the size of your world ain't what matter, whether it expand or shrink up or expand again. Hurdles to jump. You jump. Erase the lines, draw new ones. Chart a course and follow.

I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.

On frappe à la porte. Je ne bouge pas du lit. C’est mon espace sur cette planète, et j’y tiens.

The lies came to me much more easily than I would have imagined, and I felt no guilt at all. On the contrary, it was almost amusing to watch the first lie give birth to all the others.

I guess it can't be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they're making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

Would I still smile if there was no words? Would I have enjoyed things back when I had no words, back when smiling was just a reflex? ‘You seem to be having fun?’ [he said]. And for the first time I realized that I was; right now, I really was having a lot of fun. It’s true, I’m always slow to notice what I’m feeling.

I wanted the voices back. Come one guys, all of you, start going wild again, tell me you want this man. I can’t do it on my own. I can’t do it sober.

Depression is looking at the perfectly blank screen of your computer the moment before you start writing.

Depression. It’s what you discover in the interval between a perfect zero and a sense of accomplishment, that’s everyday life, that’s depression…

I was dependent, I wanted to use alcohol as the organic solvent it actually is, use it to dissolve the ever-present, unavoidable feeling that I was out of place, that what was outside my skin didn’t match. And inside my skin – myself, so small, always shivering, always quivering. To let that self out, to let it stream into the outer world, without feeling out of place. To make it possible for me to chatter away on the phone, just as I want. To let myself burst into laughter over a silly story. To shorten the emotional distance I have to go before I can cry for someone.

I’m begging you here, would you please use a strobe, use a strobe to make the blemishes fade, and while you’re at it, do me a favour and make my consciousness fade, too.

...once you try to forget something you already remember it.

I wonder what Tokyo is for. I wonder what it does. I already know the names of the stations between here and Ueno. I know where to stand so I can get off nearest the exit.

Kita Senju to Ueno is crammed beyond belief in the morning. Us drones all swing and lurch in droozy unison as the train changes speed. Normally only lovers and twins get this close to other people.

Night does not mean sleep in Tokyo. Punks slalom down shopping malls. Hostesses stifle yawns and glance at their patrons’ Rolexes. Yakuza gangsters fight on deserted building sites. High-schoolers way younger than me engage in gymnastic love-hotel sex-bouts. In an apartment high above, a fellow insomniac flushes a toilet. A pipe behind my head chunders.

...it occurred to me that everybody suffered continually, including those who pretended they didn’t.