This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.
Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth
I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.
Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.
This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.
My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.
There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?
In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.
When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in - you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small.
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?
Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.
...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this."
Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.
...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.
Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.
I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.
I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.
Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.
one could drown in irrelevance.
I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.
Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.
I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
When anything can happen, everything matters.
Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.
One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.
She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.
Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
I'm quite good at not writing.
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
