45 quotes found
“Art, and sadness, which last forever.”
“But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.”
“My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.”
“I look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.”
“People don't like it when you say real things.”
“Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.”
“And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.”
“I never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a li...”
“The old summer's-end melancholy nips at my heels. There's no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.”
“But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.”
“Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?”
“But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.”
“Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn't envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I a...”
“In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.”
“I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.”
“But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.”
“Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.”
“And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.”
“What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.”
“This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand.”
