rice dream girl

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,

Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.

Death is the end of life; ah, why

Should life all labour be?

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,

And in a little while our lips are dumb.

Let us alone. What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us, and become

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

*

"Well, I think it's amazing," Gary says. "How much work we’ll do just to feel something. I don’t think there is anything more human than that.”

*

“The movement is like yoga, Phoebe thinks. She feels glad, suddenly, for all that yoga she tried doing on Zoom during the pandemic. She feels like maybe that wasn’t a waste of time after all, if it allowed her to be present in this moment. And maybe that’s it: You do things in the moment for the person you hope you might be two years from now. You don't kill yourself when you are sad because one day you might not be sad, and you might want to go surfing with a man you really like?"

*

"Every good night out hinges on discontent. This is the theory I've come to. When I go out with Avi and the boys, I notice that they're all too satisfied with their lives at home to have anything to really propel them forward into the night. Their sofas are too comfy, their wives are too warm, their on-demand television subscriptions are too innumerable. They’re not searching for anything, they don’t need to distract themselves from themselves. This is why comedians make the best drinking companions. They will never have enough validation, enough success, enough love, enough good stories, enough material. They will always be looking for something else. A good time needs the fires of tragedy underneath it to keep it on a rolling boil."

*

"You don't let go once. That's your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you'll hear a song or you'll walk past somewhere you once went together - something will come to the surface that you'd totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times."

*

“I love how quickly you read books and how absorbed you get in a good story. I love watching you lie on the sofa reading one from cover-to-cover. It’s like I’m in the room with you but you’re in a whole other galaxy”

*

"No one in Bonnie’s life would describe her as a romantic. Between her grueling training schedule and natural inclination toward asceticism, almost every part of her life was in service to toughness. But her heart, her heart remained tender."

*

"Pavel was married for most of that time to Anahid, an Armenian war photographer who was rarely home and usually, it seemed, narrowly avoiding kidnap. Bonnie had met her a few times and was struck by both her beauty and her steeliness; she was scrupulously polite and seemed to treat most interactions as negotiations in which she was primarily concerned with getting out alive."

*

"Bonnie felt all the life in this home rushing just beneath the surface of the present moment, like running water trapped beneath a layer of ice. If only she could breka through and return to the living moments beneath"

*

"She never heard from Freja again but, with time, she stopped trying to reach her and was relieved. That love had been a type of madness and, just like the second step in AA says, she needed to be restored to sanity. But now, standing in front of Charlie’s home, that old insanity was back. What was it in her that loved a wildfire?"

*

"Lucky watched it all from her perch with a gentle remove only possible for her when several pints deep. She was perfectly drunk, not yet blacked out, but no longer fully in time and space. The best word she could think of for this state was untethered; she was a balloon slipping lightly out of the world’s grasping hand."

*

“You know why I think people do drugs?” BFG asked her suddenly… “I think they’re trying to fall in love with life again,” he said... "All the sex and booze and coke and shit[…] It’s people who have fallen out of love with life trying to get back to how they used to feel, you know?"

*

"Bonnie let her hands drop back to her sides. The difference between her and Lucky was that Lucky actually was exceptional. So was Avery, whose fast and terrifyingly efficient mind could be applied to anything. And Nicky had possessed the most social grace of anyone Bonnie knew; her students gathered around her as if warming themselves at the fire of her attention. But Bonnie just knew how to work hard. If her sisters were wild horses, she was simply a mule."

*

*

"If he pretended never to notice, and if they succeeded in whatever it was they wanted, then the fragile equilibrium of their lives at Babel would not be disturbed. Then they could maintain the thin veneer of deniability Robin had lived with for years. Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely."

*

"He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

But he could not go on like this. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth. He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind. He felt like he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double."

*

"The origins of the word 'anger' were tied closely to physical suffering. 'Anger' was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in term came from the Latin angor, which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.”

*

*

Did she know it would happen Imelda wonders Did she see it back then That she’d end up on her own with food stains on her robe surrounded by omens from long ago signs meaning nothing

Unbearable What an unbearable thing is a life

*

But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.

*

At first it looks to Dickie like there are far more bags than they’ll need. But then they start pouring in the clay and it seems just to disappear. He thinks again how being up above it all the time, you never really get a feel for how much ground there is in the ground, how much earth there is to the earth, what it takes for us to have something to walk on.

*

You get your turn But they don’t tell you that’s all it is a turn a moment Everything explodes you’re nothing but feelings Your life begins at last You think it will all be like that Then the moment passes

The moment passes but you stay in the shape you were then In the life that’s come out of the things that you did The remainder of that girl you used be that is gone

They don’t tell you How could they How could anyone make any sense of that

*

You have a dreadful feeling that it’s you did this That you made her sick with your carry-on Though you know it’s not that But simply that she is old Old A fragment of the past Like a blue jewel of glass lying unfound in a field Her face so lined Her eyes that do not recognize anything My God Time What it does You could weep from morning to night and it would not be enough

*

And you are back in that little house where Daddy had loomed over everything like the sky and you lived in his moods the sunshine the frost the storms Now the sky is gone the weather is gone

*

Tonight is about the future You've had enough past frankly to last you a lifetime

*

Immediately it’ll come back to you why you started hating him: because he taught you to be upright and wholesome and good and you found out you could not be those things; because he wants you, needs you, to be his little girl still, when you have become loathsome, crawling, ugly and perverse. Because you know that if he knew the truth he would love you anyway and somehow that is unbearable to you.

*

Without the veil you could see him clearly for the first time He was the first thing you’d seen clearly in a while in fact And as he sat there you could see that he was a ghost too That Frank had gone and left him here like you Life done but still wandering the earth

*

You would have liked to comfort him He was so sad But what could you say What solace has a ghost for another ghost

*

"William no longer felt like he was hanging off the fender of a car that sped across town and then hurtled to a stop. His hands were no longer clammy, he could sleep at night, and there were moments of calm. He was learning the difference between calm and disconnected and was working to make his days more the former than the latter"

*

"She planned—to the extent that she planned anything during the bus ride—to show up in his dorm and make him look at her. That’s all she intended to do. But in his presence, gazing at his sweet, sad face and the blue eyes that haunted her dreams, she wanted more. She wanted peace and the ability to lie in bed without feeling like she was going to explode. She wanted to speak the words manacled inside her. She wanted everything, because she could feel the walls they had both erected to hold back their desires, and she could sense the enormous beauty that lay on the far side of those walls."

*

"Julia said, “I’m afraid I messed her up, though.” She told her sister about how careful her daughter’s smile was, how deliberately engineered her carefree demeanor was, how uneventful Alice’s life was. Julia told her something Rose had said recently: that Alice lived like a cat who refused to leave its cardboard box."

*

"In the midst of a climactic scene involving a ten-car pileup, she reached over and held Julia’s hand. They hadn’t touched until now. They’d both been careful not to, because it felt like a parameter that kept them in this liminal place where they got to see each other without it counting. It was the bumpers on the strange bowling lane they were playing within. But Sylvie was running out of time, and she was no longer interested in parameters and rules—even the ones she’d made up."

*

“All her life, Maura had been aware of the loathsome stereotype, never letting herself appear too angry, too loud. She knew that the world liked to praise the saintly, those who accepted their hardships with peace, rather than rage or complaint. But when something felt this random, this unfair, how could anyone be faulted for feeling pain and expressing it?”

*

“I think you’re right about long-stringers. Some of them may not even realize what they’re doing. They just want to distance themselves from sadness, or from guilt, or from any reminders of their own mortality. No matter how much time they may have left, nobody wants to think about the end.”

“Feyi was literally standing in paradise, but all of a sudden, she was done with it, done with the endless sky and the rolling dark green of the trees on the mountain, done with the birds and the air and the yawning space, done with the gorgeous house waiting for her at the end of this walk. She wanted the brownstones again, the jogging route that led to the ice cream shop, her own bed in her own room.”

*

“It was as though they knew me well by now, despite knowing barely anything about me. It was as though you could know a person without knowing the details of their life. You could know their light, because you shared the same light”

*

"I had never imagined this kind of warmth could be so safe, so abundant. I'd spent so much time cutting and carving away at myself, worshiping cold. I feared that light and warmth were a trick, a tease, false offerings that lured you into relaxing and just when you made yourself vulnerable they would be seized. Better to adapt to the cold. Better to thrust the cold onto one's self, be prepared."

*

"Other times it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.... I carried her inside me: her voice, her feelings, her fears, her ideas of food, bodies, the world, women and men. She had long ago implanted herself into me at the cellular level until what were hers and what were mine were indistinguishable. I wondered if there were a deadline for when a person had to stop blaming her mother for her own thoughts."

*

“I looked at her face in the glow of the movie screen, swaths of light and shadow flickering on and off her pale skin. She was like a moon cycling through all its phases in rapid-fire.”

*

“We realized a big part of our lives had been missing from our murals thus far - all the people for whom we had no photos, no proof of their existence except for lingering memories: a lost love, a crush, a coworker, the mailman, a neighbour who you said hello to but never really knew, a bartender who gave you free drinks once in a while for being a loyal customer, people who seemed to peripheral to one’s life yet to incredibly important in the absence of Earth.”