A Quote Collection

We looked the other way. We spoke about everything but. But we’ve always known, and not saying now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which could hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we've lost and may never have cared for.

Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!

You lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can't bring yourself to live with the loss. And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream it, hurts just the same.

Rehearse the pain to dull the pain.

I had rehearsed losing him not just to ward off suffering by taking it in small doses beforehand, but, as all superstitious people do, to see if my willingness to accept the very worst might not induce fate to soften its blow.

He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

Perhaps, without thinking, we had taken more than a brief vacation; we were eloping together with return-trip tickets to separate destinations.

We had talked about meeting in the States, and we had talked of writing and speaking by phone—but the whole thing had a mysteriously surreal quality kept in opaque by both of us—not because we wanted to allow events to catch us unprepared so that we might blame circumstances and not ourselves, but because by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they might ever die.

Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.

Instead, I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew i'd incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda's superstitious world, anticipating the worst as sure a way of preventing it from happening.

What made me blush in the end was not the natural embarrassment of the moment when I could tell he'd caught me trying to hold his gaze only then to let mine scamper to safety; what made me blush was the thrilling possibility, unbelievable as I wanted it to remain, that he might actually like me, and that he liked me just the way I liked him.

I was not always eager to show off my knowledge, especially with someone who could so easily intimidate me. I had nothing to fight back with, nothing to add, nothing to throw in to muddy waters between us, nowhere to hide or run for cover.

Meanwhile, tomorrow, if we went for an early morning swim, I might be overcome again with this surfeit of self-loathing. I wondered if one got used to that. Or does one accrue a deficit of malaise so large that one learns to find ways to consolidate it in one lump feeling with its own amnesties and grace periods? Or does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like an intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell—so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who'll relieve it at night?

I wondered what part I played in the overall happiness package.

How I hated waiting and depending on the whim of others.