When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.
— Richard Bachman/Stephen King (Rage)
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
— Voltaire [translated by John Butt] (Candide)
You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.
— Jonathan Tropper (This is Where I Leave You)
Life on Paper
I’ve spent much of my life in a sun-bright room
reading about all the pieces of life
About experiences not mine, about feelings someone else’s
that I feel all the same
Loving and hating nonexistent people that I know so well but
that cannot know me back
And I can see all this life through my window too
Feel it tugging and teasing and urging whenever I venture out into it
So vivid I could write you a thousand truths about it
Lay out in ink a fiction that speaks to the nonfictional heart
as every person wishes reality could
And I have searched for all that books promise me
The justice, the love, the sense that everything amounts to
something significant in the end, even if that significant something
is insignificance
And I know I’ve seen these promises fulfilled before
when I’ve peered into some moments belonging to other people
I’ve even heard them knocking at my own door, sometimes even
looked one of them in the eye
But most of them I never know how to embrace
outside the safety of my own imagination
away from pages of a novel or a notebook or a blank screen
And I’m tired of living on paper, but I haven’t figured out yet
how to live to the extent I feel is possible
outside this night-dark room
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones—a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
