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His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.
What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.
As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.
Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.
Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.
Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.
Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can
Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.
Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?
Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.
It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.
Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.
The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape, or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affair and return home.
I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times you See Them.
It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life - your success - depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there.
Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic--their pessimism or insecurity (something really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)--and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.
Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.
When you grow up--and from the look of things, you have awhile--but you learn things never go back to normal simply because everyone's sorry. Sorry is ridiculous.
Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.
Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times.
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