Books I Like: Self

My favorite quotes...

Clearly I received love before I started returning it, and I returned it before I knew it had a name.

Memory is sometimes a distant spectator which can name emotions but not convey them.

When I was alone I was happy and whole, but when we were together the whole was greater. There was an added brightness to things, a greater and deeper perspective.

What I had here, I sensed, was nihilism, the deliberate wrecking of being to assert being in the face of non-being.

Everything that could be done on the outside to try to make the inside happy was done.

The only word she spoke that I understood, the most powerful word in her language, was my name.

I awoke in the morning with the conviction that love is an insomnia that wakes us from the sleep of life.

Will I be understood when I say that sometimes numbness can hurt? That you don’t want to feel because what you feel will be pain, so you try not to feel, and just sit there, immobile, numb, in pain?

But I was still fully imbued with that quite stupid, invincible thing called youth.

Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don’t like.

Travelling is like an acceleration: it’s hard to stop, you don’t want to stop.

My life was a busy kind of solitude, much motion with little emotion.

Death: the oldest story in the world, yet still a surprise.

Anywhere but near her was nowhere.

Friendliness is a good quality, but it should be accompanied by other qualities. Otherwise it is like gift-wrapping an empty box.

Necessity is the mother of tolerance.

I’d be a housewife anytime. Just give me a good man.

These are my people, my wide acres.

What strikes me now is not how much I’ve forgotten.

A close relationship starts when barriers begin to fall.

“Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”

Love, like any living thing, settles where it feels it has a future.

So our pleasures were of the moment. My mistake was to believe that he had faith in that moment.

The sort of friendship where a separation of time and space is merely a pause in an ongoing conversation.