Clara

 Favourite quotes:
“Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar. Reflecting sunlight, they swirled and sailed and fluttered on the wind drafts.” 
“lot of times love doesn't work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections.” 

“She laughed for his sake, something she'd never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.” 

“If anyone would understand loneliness, the moon would.” 

“Faces change with life's toll, but eyes remain a window to what was...” 

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”

“I'm like you,' he said. ‘I remember everything.' I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name”

“We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”

Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy.

I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, identifiable sound can make you jump.

This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

“It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one's mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor's house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”

“Sometimes the smartest remark is silence.”

“The heart dies a slow death. Shedding each hope like leaves, until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”

“We must not expect happiness. It is not something we deserve. When life goes well, it is a sudden gift; it cannot last forever.”

“My mother always said my sister was like wood. As rooted to the Earth as a sakura tree. But she told me I was like water. Water can carve its way through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.”

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”

Conell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example

Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people amd smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away

Who were you? She thinks, now that theres no one left to answer the question.

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”

Connell is silent again. He leans down and kisses her on the forehead. I would never hurt you, okay? he says. Never. She nods and says nothing. You make me really happy, he says. His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I'm not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed, she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life. 

"What do you want to kiss me for? I'm filthy."
"So am I." 

“Saukeln,” she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneosly calling her a Saumensch. I think that's as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.

A Small But Noteworthy Note: I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They're running at me.

  On many counts, taking a boy like Ruby was robbery - so much life, so much to live for - yet somehow, I'm certain he would have loved to see the frightening rubble and the swelling of the sky on the night he passed away. He'd have cried and turned and smiled if only he could have seen the book thief on her hands and knees, next to his lifeless body. He'd have been glad to witness her kissing his dusty, bombhit lips.Yes, I know it.In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know.He'd have loved it all right. You see? Even death has a heart. 

“I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.”

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. . . . Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

“I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”

“And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”

“In everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.”

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. 

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. 

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him. 

You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.

 Favourite quotes:

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

“My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number , useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried.”

There's a window with white curtains, and the glass is shatterproof. But it isn't running away they're afraid of. A Handmaid wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes. The ones you can open in yourself given a cutting edge. Or a twisted sheet and a chandelier.

An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

“Will you wait for me forever?”

“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“What happens when people open their hearts?” “They get better.”

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”

We should live here.' After just two days of the possibilities of Venice, I said, ‘We should live here.' And Tom's answer was, ‘We should fly to the moon.' But he was smiling.

”Dunno much about art.” “You don't have to. That's the wonderful thing about it. It's about reacting to it. Feeling it, if you like. It's not really anything to do with knowledge”