So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come.
From this day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.
I looked aside quickly for fear my eyes would give me away; one's eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within.
And my life is changed forever. But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?
Their unhappiness was one of the constants of my earliest years, a high, unceasing buzz just beyond hearing.
Death is the perfecting medium.
The past beats inside me like a second heart."
Life, so it used to seem to me, my dear Regina, is a formless and forever shifting stuff, a globe of molten glass, say, which we have been flung, and which, without even the crudest of instruments, with only our bare hands, we must shape into a perfect sphere, in order to be able to contain it within ourselves.
I've spent my life plunged to the elbows in the secrets of others, their dirty little sins. What does it matter what people do? I mean, when it's done it's done.
At the final moment, we shall at last perceive the secret and essential form of all we have been, of all our actions and thoughts.
He was after the eternal laws that govern the harmony of the world. Through awful thickets, in darkest night, he stalked his fabulous prey.
I hold the world to be a manifestation of the possibility of order.
He had used her up without knowing it, and now it was done. There would be the usual fuss, tears and pleas, screams, recriminations, but all that would not last long. He was an old hand at ending things.
He often marvelled at the extremes of discomfort and misery that children were expected to endure without the slightest squeak of protest or complaint.
I’m writing a memoir. It’s a pack of lies.
You’re not really alone when you are writing and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.
I don’t enjoy my own company. I always feel there’s somebody missing.
I now realise that there are only two kinds of people in the world. People who are bereaved and those who are yet to be bereaved.
I thought when I was this age, I’d have nothing but time. But I find you’re running around like a blue-arsed fly.
Jealousy makes you feel you're the only person suffering in the entire world, the only person suffering like this, like having a red-hot knife-blade lodged in your side, the side where your heart used to be.
The evening rested here, bronzed and quietly breathing, basking like an exhausted acrobat in the afterglow of marvellous exploits of light and weather.
Death was saving him up for a future feast.
Wrong, wrong: for our lives contain us, we are the flaw in the crystal, the speck of grit which must be ejected from the spinning sphere.
His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.