“The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn't make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn't imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference.”
“Once someone loses trust, that’s it, Gerald. It’s gone. It’s broken. You can’t repair it with explanations. You can’t wheedle trust back from someone.”
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. . . ”
“And the seasons, as now, reliably made everything new again. He liked to remember Goethe’s line: “A man can stand anything but a succession of ordinary days.”
“and male company in Mireille’s neurasthenic”
“As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. ”
“For a moment the mole let his disappointment show on his snout. Then he grunted, "You're much smarter than you smell." Liza let out a whoop of satisfaction and chose not to worry too much about what stupidity smelled like.”
“Solange and all her irritating brothers could get themselves kiled without me. I deserved to be part of their clandestine plans. I'd earned it. And I was sure they'd need a human touch at some point. And if they asked Hunter to help instead of me, I'd stake every last one of them myself.
Mom says jealousy is unattractive.
So's a broken nose.
I'm just saying.”
“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”
“WELL, THEN SHAG IT, YOU SUITCASE! GET OVER HERE!”
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