a collection of quotes

There are moments when I've literally felt drowned in life. When circumstances have led to a moment so rife with possibility, a possibility that you can't possibly understand. It's like you are in your shoes, you continue to breathe, sit—other people around you. One or two smile and turn. People you know. I remember Arlene going Leena like even she knew the lid was being flipped off my world. Yet I would go home. I would have supper in Arlington and my brother and sister would turn as I entered the room oh it's you. I would throw myself down on the couch and I would sing along with my favorite songs. I would close my eyes. I would sing along. Maybe I would go to graduate school. I would get drunk this weekend, meet someone cute, probably make out. I loved to kiss. I loved to get lost in a drunk embrace. Somebody else, to feel I could turn into that, get lost in a moment of not caring. A woman would kiss me one day. I even felt it. Perhaps I would not always live in Boston. I would travel. My life would change. All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them—out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not—no I couldn't speak.

The most terrible beauty came out at night. In daylight the world was full of facts; you could live in a swarm of errands. At night, late, there was only desire or its absence, after the other stories had been pulled in off the streets.

That’s the day she reached inside me / for something I didn’t think I had. / And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river / she pulled the river out of me. That’s / the way I want to know God.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new strawberries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; it is the sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die. Green sadness weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it is the funereal silence of bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk in joy.

Sometimes it seem all I have are questions, that I will ask the same ones all my life. I'm not sure if I even want any answers, don't think I'd have a use for them, but I do know I'd give anything to be another person — anyone else — for even just a day, an hour. There's something about that distance I'd do anything to cross.

I keep wondering what, in me, might be constant. I catch myself looking for that remainder, retracing my steps as if in search of lost keys. I am always wondering if there's something holy between people, a formless thing, something that can't be bruised.

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.

Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, though slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sadness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world's greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echoing down a long corridor, it is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.

My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song — nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.

Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips with scissors and then into little pieces by a knife, it is the sadness of reverie and nostalgia: it may be, for example, the memory of a happiness that is only a memory, it has receded into a niche that cannot be dusted for it is beyond your reach; distinct and dusty, blue sadness lies in your inability to dust it, it is as unreachable as the sky, it is a fact reflecting the sadness of all facts. Blue sadness is that which you wish to forget, but cannot, as when on a bus one suddenly pictures with absolute clarity a ball of dust in a closet, such an odd, unshareable thought that one blushes, a deep rose spreading over the blue fact of sadness, creating a situation that can only be compared to a temple, which exists, but to visit it one would have to travel two thousand miles on snowshoes and by dogsled, five hundred by horseback and another five hundred by boat, with a thousand by rail.

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for — the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound. If only I could embroider. Weave, knit, something to do with my hands. I want a cigarette. I remember walking in art galleries, through the nineteenth century: the obsession they had then with harems. Dozens of paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard. Studies of sedentary flesh, painted by men who'd never been there. These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

He shows no anger, / I show no anger but in flashes of humor, / all is courtesy and horror. And after / the first minute, when I say, Is this about / her, and he says, No it's about / you, we do not speak of her.

I wish this story were different. I with it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulent.

At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn. A view of the horizon, the whole entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of the horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me.

I imagined the stairs to the lobby, the pay phones in the dark, the coins against my thumb, his voice. The scramble to think of things to say, with only little reprieves, during which I would have to listen to whatever things he had thought up to say. Then the dial tone again, higher-pitched than in America—it was always there, like the sea inside a shell—and the empty dull feeling in my chest, like now, only worse. At the same time, it seemed certain to me that someday I would really want to hear his voice and wouldn't be able to, and I would think back to the time that he had invited me to call him, and it would seem as incomprehensible as an invitation to speak to the dead.

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I wanted to write about it while I could still feel it and see it around me, while the teacups still seemed to be trembling.