quotes from books i like

Despite my substantial efforts, I have failed to find another soul. We have all scattered far and wide into the vastness of this space and cannot find one an- other. I suspect by now we are all alone.

It was as if my neural wiring had been rewritten in accordance with a modified version of Descartes's famous dictum, "I think therefore I am." Now it was "I think I am in Hell, therefore I am."

How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purposc to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning - that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series of overwhelming transmissions.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you.

I felt as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision to live in one of them. Now it was just me.

A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn't need names. People who served a function didn't need to be named.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

So we proceeded, locked into our separate im- peratives. They had their lives, and I had mine. I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance. I

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.

As for the others, I don't know what they told themselves, and I didn't want to know, but I believe they all at least pretended to some level of curiosity. Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.

I didn't know where it came from, but I had the vague idea that things would settle down some- what-the way agitated water smooths itself out when you wait a little while.

And so we thought together back to what it had been like when we had first met: everything as always, everything as if for the first time, candle- light and narrow glasses and this and that bar, the movies, the theater, finally your apartment and then my apartment and then yours again; every- thing as usual, everything as never.

An old house with a strange history, and occupants who were unstable refugees from another time. Elegant rags on half-forgotten bones.

And she admitted that directly after the incident she experienced a profound calm. The endless loop of anxiety, fear and loathing had stopped for a few hours. Because she'd no longer cared about anything. The future, the past, repercussions, how she looked to everyone else was irrelevant. And the only emotion that she could identify in the period of tranquillity following an occurrence in which she'd drawn blood was relief. She was thankful there was no going back. She'd freed herself.

Ноw? Нow?

It meant sooner or later I was going to lose you again. No matter how deformed I felt, or how hobbled I was by your absence, with time I would develop the right callus to get on with life and you would slip into the background like a hand on someone's leg that they feel less and less the longer it stays there.