☞ ‘ my fatal flaw is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. ’
☞ ‘ i gave you credit for a little more savoir faire than that, if you don’t mind my
saying so. ’
☞ ‘ beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. quite the contrary. genuine beauty is
always quite alarming. ’
☞ ‘ and if beauty is terror, then what is desire ? ’
☞ ‘ what’ve you got ? is that gin ? where’d you dig that up ? ’
☞ ‘ do you have any plans ? what are you doing for the next forty or fifty years
of your life ? ’
☞ ‘ by now my thoughts were so contradictory and disturbing that i could
no longer even speculate, only wonder dumbly at what was taking place
around me. ’
☞ ‘ whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. ’
☞ ‘ if we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that
naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring
our bones, then spit us out reborn. ’
☞ ‘ but how ? how could you possibly justify cold blooded murder ? ’
☞ ‘ i prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter. ’
☞ ‘ it is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the
world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and
skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. ’
☞ ‘ i’m not particularly happy here, but you’re not particularly happy with where
you are, either ’
☞ ‘ beauty, unless she is wed to something more meaningful, is always superficial. ’
☞ ‘ love doesn’t conquer anything, and anyone who says it does is a fool. ’
☞ ‘ i am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. ’
☞ ‘ anything is grand if it is done at a large enough scale ’
☞ ‘ there is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit
makes. nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and
death been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people
put so much faith in lies and mutability and death, death, death. ’
☞ ‘ in short: i felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. ’
☞ ‘ i suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. ’
☞ ‘ any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness. ’
☞ ‘ all those layers of silence on silence. ’
☞ ‘ not quite what one expected, but one realizes it couldn’t have happened
any other way. ’
☞ ‘ what are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy ? light shining from a
dead star ? ’
☞ ‘ how about a kiss for your jail bird brother ? ’
☞ ‘ she was like a reverie to me. ’
☞ ‘ we think we have many desires, but we in fact have one: to live. to live forever. ’
☞ ‘ in this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and
there like figures from an allegory, or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten
garden party. ’
☞ ‘ i’m not dead. i’m only having a bit of trouble with my passport. ’
