What I Loved

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts

The man was heavy with life. So often it’s lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that.

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

...a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.

I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs.

He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.

the spectator is the true vanishing point

In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New york or a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didnt mean a resumption for our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream.The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didnt excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangled that feeling of injury but couldnt do it - not fully.

I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.

I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything

All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there.

I don't know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else.

But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.

Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.

Mój lęk brał się z czegoś dużo potężniejszego i nie tak realnego jak Mark czy Teddy Giles. Nie mógł się pomieścić w jednej osobie. Ta groźba była niewidzialna, podlegała przeobrażeniom i ogarniała dosłownie wszystko. Przerażenie wywołane czymś tak niechwytnym może wskazywać, że wpadłem w obłęd, że upodobniałem się do Dana, który w ataku paranoi potrafił niewinne klepnięcie po plecach odebrać jako próbę zamachu na jego życie, ale szleńswto przybiera różne formy. Większość z nas od czasu do czasu doznaje czegoś podobnego, ulegając powabowi psychicznego rozpadu. Wtedy jednak wcale nie flirtowałem z myślą o szaleństwie. Zdawałem sobie sprawę, że duszący mnie niepokój nie jest racjonalny, ale zarazem instynktownie wiedziałem, że choć to, czego się lękam, znajduje się poza sferą rozumu, ten nonsens również potrafi być realny.

That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we are sure of.

but I gathered that Violet had been in and out of many beds in her young life, and that not every bed had had a man in it. For Erica, who had slept with exactly three men in the course of her thirty-nine years, Violet's erotic adventures were more than intriguing anecdotes. They were tales of enviable daring and freedom.

Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it's been much longer than that. We've spent years living inside each other.