luce (cry baby) > Books: its-about-the-yearning‎ (19)

“That this was the trade-off. The price of happiness. In order to

“That this was the trade-off. The price of happiness. In order to feel happy he had to feel everything.”

“He didn’t want to die, he just wanted to stop, to cease, sit down. Maybe just sleep, for a year or maybe forever.”

“Boy meets girl at a wedding and the world ends. The classic meetcute.”

“He wondered why he always seemed destined to be slightly too far ahead or too far behind his own life.”

“Emory couldn’t imagine what it felt like to inhabit space you truly owned. Cities were hostile to anyone who couldn’t count on the split rent and utilities of partnership. Being one person was more expensive than she had been taught to anticipate.”

“He wondered if a love not properly expressed mutated into something jagged and unwieldy like metal, something that could kill you.”

“Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found hap

“Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.”

“He went there in the mornings, sometimes, and gave himself to that strange country rapture, that deep, bonewarming feeling that England was his, and he was England’s. He felt it as strongly as if his ancestors had been there a thousand years. Perhaps he felt it more strongly because they hadn’t.”

“Ellwood’s England was magical, thought Gaunt, picking his way around nettles. But it wasn’t England.”

“It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children . It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.”

“I wish I could be more articulate, but the English language fails me. It sometimes feels as if the only words that still have meaning are place names: Ypres, Mons, Artois. Nothing else expresses.”

“My dearest, darling Sidney, There was nothing else.”

“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried. He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.”

“Ellwood was surprised to find that he was not glad either, although his hatred grew and grew. But he could not hate soldiers. He longed to destroy, to hurt, to kill, but he wasn’t sure whom. Possibly the civilians.”

“Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt […] feared that ugliness was too important to ignore..”

“How alive it all seemed, and how gracious—to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.”

“It was a common conversation. In 1913, you might ask a new acquaintance where he had gone to school, or what he did for a living. In 1916, it was this: what part of yourself did you most fear losing?”

“He did not know that it was the first thing homesick little boys in their dormitories learnt at boarding school: how to cry in silence.”

“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the

“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere. But it’s a good place to be, I think. It’s like floating. From up above, you can see everything at once. It’s the only way how.”

“I have learned one of the lessons of loneliness, one of its shocking side effects: when you are in a state of longing,

“I have learned one of the lessons of loneliness, one of its shocking side effects: when you are in a state of longing, desire goes on and on, like an ocean without a shore.”

“I realize this all sounds rather abject. But it's not really love unless there is something abject in it. Don't you think?”

“And so that was what love led to. To wound and be wounded. ”

“And so that was what love led to. To wound and be wounded. ”

“Pretty girls I had seen, lovely girls, no doubt, but I had never paid much conscious attention to their looks, never been particularly interested in them. But this was something different. No, it was not different. It was merely being awakened to something for the first time—physical beauty. I was never blind to it again.”

“Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets.”

“These people seemed to be beset on every side by “temptations”; they lived in continual terror of falling into “sin”. Sin? What was sin? Evidently there loomed in the dark background a mysterious horror from which pure-minded girls must turn away their thoughts, but there were dangers enough near at hand which made it necessary to walk with extreme wariness—pitfalls, which one could hardly avoid without the help of God.”

“Did I understand the play at that first reading? Oh, certainly not. Haven’t I put the gathered experience of years into my recollection of it? No doubt. What is certain is that it gave me my first conception of tragedy, of the terror and complication and pity of human lives. Strange that for an English child that revelation should have come through Racine instead of through Shakespeare. But it did.”

“I went to bed that night in a kind of daze, slept as if I had been drugged and in the morning awoke to a new world—a world of excitement—a world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which I myself seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.”

“But there was no need of wine to intoxicate me. Everything in her proximity was intoxicating.”

“The dullest of her girls was stirred into some sort of life in her presence; to the intelligent, she communicated a Promethean fire which warmed and coloured their whole lives. To sit at table at her right hand was an education in itself.”

“No, I have never seen anyone freer from every sort of selfishness, never seen anyone devote herself to others with such manifest gladness. And yet, with all her altruism, one could never think of her as self-sacrificing. She never did sacrifice herself. She had no self to sacrifice. When she gave her time, her thoughts, her energies to bringing up her stepbrothers and stepsisters, it was really a joy to her.”

“I think there was nothing else she wanted. If I too would have liked to serve, I was continually conscious that I was incapable and unworthy, continually devoured by vain humilities. And then there was also in me a curious repugnance, a terror of getting too near.”

“Let me think of those words later, I said to myself, there’s too much in them—too much joy and terror. I must brush them aside for the moment. I must keep them, bury them, like a dog his bone, till I can return to them alone.”

“It was at this time that a change came over me. That delicious sensation of gladness, of lightness, of springing vitality, that consciousness of youth and strength and ardour, that feeling that some divine power had suddenly granted me an undreamt-of felicity and made me free of boundless kingdoms and untold wealth, faded as mysteriously as it had come and was succeeded by a very different state. Now I was all moroseness and gloom—heavy-hearted, leaden-footed.”

“But I wasn’t thinking. I was sometimes dreaming—the foolish dreams of adolescence: of how I should save her life at the cost of my own by some heroic deed, of how she would kiss me on my death-bed, of how I should kneel at hers and what her dying word would be, of how I should become famous by writing poems which no one would know were inspired by her, of how one day she would guess it, and so on and so on.”

“On the very first morning of what was to be my new life, how could I expect to banish entirely those haunting visions—of a shoulder—of a profile?”

“I had been so utterly absorbed by the newness and violence of all my emotions, that it had never occurred to me the present could be anything but eternal.”

“I must feed on beauty and rapture in order to grow strong.”

“I pondered the episodes I have just related. I lived them over again, sometimes with ecstasy, sometimes with anguish.”

“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything

“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”

“[I] think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”

“I have a problem with that sometimes, getting attached. Other people’s families are a weakness of mine.”

“What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself.”

“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”

“There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence.”

“There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence.”

“It felt like a passion, it felt like being in love, it was being in love, it was the kind of thing you delude yourself that, if all goes well, will last a lifetime. Things, of course, didn't go well. When do they?”

“It is interesting how such reputations are built. They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history.”

“I found her exciting in a disturbing way, a soul-shacking way, without knowing in the least what I wanted of her.”

“Tragedy is insignificant, banal. A falling boy goes largely unnoticed.”

“Tragedy is insignificant, banal. A falling boy goes largely unnoticed.”

“It was unexpected. It was raw. It was startling. It was awful. It was beautiful. It was factual. Heartbreaking. Cruel. Fresh. Real.”

“I never meant for any of it to happen. Or no. Part of me meant for part of it to happen. I was nothing but a kid then. Twenty-six, naive, and ambitious as hell. A skinny friendless woman in thick glasses with a mop of coarse black hair. There were so many people I had not yet become.”

“I’ll tell you how it started. With a simple, tragic accident.”

“And then, somewhere among all those larger, major memories, there was this minor but foul little one: the feeling of being in my twenties at a party and looking out at some horribly attractive crowd. The feeling of them glancing at me with barely registered pity: Oh, that thing in the corner. Isn’t that funny. It thinks it’s people.”

“There is nothing more pathetic than being the only person who believes in you.”

“Her grief was so much bigger than one meager photograph. That was just art. This was death and life. I felt foolish and thickheaded—and so, so ugly.”

“At the time she was my only friend. She was so dear to me.”

“The thing about remembering is that each time you retrieve an event from the past it alters the memory itself. If to tell a story is to repaint the past, to remember is to crumple; to fold, unfold, refold, and inevitably rip. If to tell a story is to renovate, to remember is to destroy.”

“I didn’t want to talk to them. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. I hoped a familiar hope, a hope I’d developed years before, in high school: that when they looked back on it no one would remember that I’d been there at all..”

“It could transform me from the unknown photographer I was into the artist I wanted to be: serious, disciplined, honest, ruthless. I was dizzy with anticipation. I was hungry with ambition. Self-Portrait #400 could change my life.”

“My Angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”

“My Angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”

“Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real? It was the terror of this hopelessness that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late, before the chains fell around her and locked.”

"Actors are by nature volatile–alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up stir them t

"Actors are by nature volatile–alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster."

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this - two things: I crave the truth. And I lie.

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this - two things: I crave the truth. And I lie.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of longsightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

In all my career I had never felt the presence of evil as I felt it then: strong and rancid-sweet in the air, curling invisible tendrils up table-legs, nosing with obscene delicacy at sleeves and throats.

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.

“I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.”

“He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himse

“He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.”

“The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.”

“One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”

“Four boys and a girl, they were nothing so unusual at a distance. At close range, though, they were an arresting party—at least to me, who had never seen anything like them, and to whom they suggested a variety of picturesque and fictive qualities.”