Biography of X

Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

I do not belong to the era of writers who will be able to make any sense of this particularly turbulent chapter of American history; one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.

I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.

People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.

There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.

Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I’s?

I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew.

Democracy is only as good as the people can make it, and we’re a country of idiots, don’t you think so?" “I don’t think so,” Lehrer said. “That’s because you’re an idiot, too.

I was angry," he said, "and I'm still angry, but you can't really be angry with a place unless you love it. You have to love it to wish it to be better, to wish it could be different.

--and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.

She could not hurt me. I had no more space, at the time, to hold any new hurts.

the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.

I'd always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was.

Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

I believe the world—all parts of the world—I believe it is all logical, only there is not enough time in one life to locate every explanation, do you understand?” he asked. “We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.

You have to know what you're leaving out in order for it to not be there. Otherwise, it's not an absence, it's just nothing.

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

I cannot remember what we spoke about, only that it felt as if we were resuming a conversation we'd been having for years. What do people ever talk about at times like this, the first meeting of years and years of meetings? It seems at such times that we are the least in a hurry to explain ourselves, intuitively knowing there is time to get to all of it, that there is plenty of time.

From the first moment we met in April 1989, there was an unnamable sentiment between us, one that arrived so quickly there was no moment to question it. It wasn't love, nor was it lust or obsession. It was something both visceral and beyond viscera.

She kept losing track of the people she loved, and losing track of herself along with them.

This cowardice, unknowingness in the face of my own feelings is why I betray those I love, verbally, when I refused to express my feelings for them.

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root.

A loss tinged with shame, regret, or a sense of something unfinished is the most dangerous sort, a black-hole grief that pulls a person relentlessly toward its center, and when our lives come to one of these we are forced to bow before it or to detach completely.

X believed that making fiction was sacred...and she wanted to live in that sanctity, not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world. She chose, instead, to live a life in which nothing was fixed, nothing was a given--that her name might change from day to day, moment to moment, and the same was true for her beliefs, her memories, her manner of dress, her manner of speech, what she knew, what she wanted. All of it was always being called into question. All of it was costume and none of it was solid. Not even her past was a settled matter, and though anything else around her might fluctuate, that unsettled core--her history--was to remain unsettled.

It’s a common hope of the young—for later acclaim to redeem the insignificance of earlier years—

All I can come up with is that there would be these occasional moments

There are reasons that people vacation in a place renowned for its cliffs when they’re feeling very clear and glad—when they’re enjoying immense success in love or money and not at all at risk of stepping over a precipice—because in that moment I felt I should leave the cabin and lurch into a ravine and leave it at that. I had been wrong about us.

as I, too, could not un-locate myself from the site of my banishment.

...to proceed as if there had been [none] at all rather than reckon with a love that was impossible to resolve or fold away neatly. It is better to cut than to tear,

Conclusions are never reached. Resolutions are never adopted. A marriage continues because it continues.