Manda's Book Corner

When we are living in a fairy-tale we are not aware of it; in memory alone do we discover its magic.

I lived with one great idea, with a dream, a lie in which we all begin to believe, sooner or later.

Ah, awful weight! Infinity

But I felt as though I'd fallen into a Charlie Chaplin film—a tragic world in which I was isolated, different from others, and unable to communicate.

Because she's such a perfect creature and I'm such an imperfect one. Perfect creatures have the most perfect way of ruining the imperfect ones.

And to him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forego one second of this pang of unsurpassable bliss.

If there weren't you in the world, then I shouldn't be in the world, either.

This was no actual world, it was the dream-world of one's childhood—a great circumscribed reminiscence. The world had become unreal. She herself was a strange, transcendent reality.

She had a childish belief in the miraculous power of strange scenes and new faces to transform her life and wipe out bitter memories.

For a moment she found this prospect terrifying—that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights—but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time; how she herself had lived most of her life. You groped around in the dark. You settled for stories, not recordings. You made do with the bits you had and tried your best to fill in the rest.

All her life, it seemed, she had run headfirst in precisely the wrong directions. It was not for lack of opportunity. She knew very well where the sun shone, and yet was bound by impulse to bury herself in the dark.

‘Why d’you read then?’

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

What a fine thing it is that thinking is private, no matter what company you’re in.

London serves itself with no concession to the lives of those within, and the very best we can manage is to tie our patched histories to it.

But Eli, that’s who I was and I did those things. So who the fuck am I to absolve myself of anything now?