the book thieves

…And when sleep comes to stretch me out and take me to my own silence there is a great white wind that destroys my sleep and from it fall leaves, they fall like knives upon me, draining me of blood. And each wound has the shape of your mouth.

You closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too — even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

She didn’t have it in her to keep tabs on everyone else’s emotions and then to fit her own emotions in without stomping on people. It was all she could do to keep on top of herself. As a result, she hurt others, which only hurt herself. A hard life.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

I lay still, existing with what I was, with what people would think of me. There was a superficial or movie-ish impulse to get up and get dressed, disgusted afresh at my talent for carnality where there should just have been visible torment, but I ignored it, let it burn out, leaving only the level of reality that wasn’t interested in the movies, the alleged consensus, the bad script. It wasn’t defiance or self-forgiveness. It was my soul’s weird expansion to accommodate itself, all its opposites and approximations. I thought of how exhausted the God who wasn’t there must be, who’d been doing this from the Beginning, with no end in sight.