A Fatal Inversion

Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.

The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don't live too long.

Love is about allowing. Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you're really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That's the only kind of love worth having.

Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to "love." Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural.

But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said. that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer's day. I was happy, that's what it was.

Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.

Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed.

Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.

Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.

The wonderful thing about the human mind is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it. For what had happen was not the worst, you realize that. the worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.

A disturbing experience it had been, exciting and confusing.

We are all mad at three in the morning

Those who have inside their lives an empty space need to fill it with love if they can, and if they cannot, with things. And they need to please others in order that others may give them love. Those who need love with the hunger the rest of mankind keeps for food, for the necessaries of life, give their bodies simply and without reflection for a return of love, would give their soul if they knew how, are reduced to thievery of the basest kind and of the basest things because this is the easiest way.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. I am I and you are you. And if we find each other that's beautiful, if not, it can't be helped.

Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so.

Life is too short to be so circumspect.

I think life's too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.

You do not put off things because they threaten you, because you are afraid; It was a rule of life.

Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.

He thought, I know what my idea of heaven would be, if by heaven we mean a place of bliss in which to pass eternity: a sanctuary where one might chain-smoke without impairment of breathing, destruction of the lungs, or damage to the heart, light each fresh cigarette from the glowing butt of its predecessor, and drink ice-free but hundred-proof chilled vodka laced with two drops of angostura and a gill of newly opened Perrier endlessly, with increasing euphoria, until a peak of joy and ease was reached but without any subsequent nausea or pain or dehydration or oblivion…

When the process began, when association started an entering procedure—at, for instance, the sound of a Greek or Spanish place name, the taste of raspberries, the sight of candles out of doors—he had taught himself to touch an escape key, rather like that on the computers he sold.