Life

Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.

That’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.

We were sent to earth to fulfill our mandate and life’s purpose.

Follow Your Heart & The world Shall Follow YOU!Reject it and It stops beating!

The world is abounding with beauty. You are a demonstration of this.

How ridiculous that water ran out of your eyes when your heart hurt. Tragic heroines in books tended to be amazingly beautiful. Not a word about swollen eyes or a red nose. 'Crying always gives me a red nose,' thought Elinor. 'I expect that's why I'll never be in any book.

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.

In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home.

You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled - not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.

There are problems and there are problems. One big problem and a great paradox in the arena of life is the problem of where or how a person is now and where or how he wants to be tomorrow. Had it not been this problem, we would have been relaxing all day long.

I expect you to vanishup and up into the tree,a shake of the branchesand gone like youhad never happened.But you came down and handed me a leaf'from seven limbs up,already yellow,' you said,and then you walked awayand you were still real.

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.

You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist.

First things first, though, I thought, and headed straight for the liquor cabinet. Times like this call for straight scotch, no rocks.