Paint It Black Quotes
"Nobody ever really loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list."
"From the outside it looked like death. People could pound the walls all they wanted, but they’d never find the door."
"Killing John Lennon seemed like just mopping up. Thirty thousand people missing in El Salvador, those nuns, and everybody in America was worried about who shot JR."
"It’s the only thing he’s really suited for. If he can’t do that, then why exist."
"Who can know God’s intentions? Who can know His Mind?"
"But Paris was gone. There was no Blaise or little Jeanne. They would never live on one of those houseboats, growing papyrus on tire rafts in the Seine."
"He wanted God, but he was too full of moods and doubts."
"It’s devastating to have your mother reject your father for you. Screws up the whole Oedipal chain of command."
"Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world."
"We loved each other. Didn’t we? I can’t remember. You’ll have to remember for both of us."
"I’ll give you more than permission," she said, rolling her forehead on his, drinking in that smell, pine and moss. "I’ll give you the whole enchilada."
"This is what I love about you," Michael said, pressing his forehead to hers, his arm around her neck. "You give me permission, you don’t even know."
"But then he forgot how. He stopped being able to see it."
"He believed in a true world. A world behind this one, that shines through it, like a candle through a lampshade."
"You know why artists live in garrets, Michael?"
"I see it all quite clearly. We meet the little match girl and out goes Harvard, we’ve dropped out and suddenly we’re playing La Bohème down there in Echo Park. Alas, poor Mimì."
"It’s not La Bohème if there’s money from home. You understand me? Go back to Harvard. You’re almost done, you cannot keep changing your mind."
"I hated Harvard," Michael said. "It’s cold and we were reading things I read at nine. I wasn’t learning anything that I couldn’t have learned just as well at the public library."
"Beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another."
"Life was a fucking stretch of surf, and you rode your board, it was all you could do."
"The peace she had felt before, that tiny moment, was gone."
"Maybe she would check out too and there wouldn’t be one goddamn person in the world who would remember."
"It was hard enough just to sit with the things she’d already gotten wrong, ways in which she’d failed him all on her own."
"Everything about filmmaking was serious to Jeremy Scott."
"She knew she was betraying Michael again. Going behind his back."
"She didn’t know how she looked to Meredith, fucked up and unwashed, jacket scarred, her punked-out bleached hair and Tyrell face."
"She was a girl who would eat from a tray on a lace napkin when her lover had killed himself."
"She had killed the thing she loved, and she was still here, needing to eat and sleep and pay the rent."
"They could only struggle over it, like ladies fighting over a shirt at a year-end sale at May Company."
"Michael said history existed only in the human mind, subject to endless revision."
"By a special few. Those in the know. Cogno meaning recognition—cogitato, to think."
"If you ate the brains, would you learn what the animal knew?"
"Imagine having the confidence to believe that someone paid that much attention to you."
"I’ve tried to imagine his house, but there’s just nothing. I miss him so much. Just a small thing. Please."
"It wasn’t so awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief."
"She was a girl who didn’t give a crap, that’s who the fuck she was."
"The realization comes later, when you understand you will never see her again."
"She was free in the way only the dead are free. That was fucking true."
"You're the last piece of him left. I needed to know you."
"Maybe you just kept peeling and never got down to the real face, maybe it just got smaller and smaller until there was nothing at all."
"You can't take that shit out on me, I didn't even know the guy."
"You’re not very observant. But Meredith could look at these pictures all day and have no idea what she was seeing."
"It was a mistake, I was drunk, it’s not what you think."
"I think about dying. I think about it all the time. I don’t know what I have to live for now."
"What was it I thought I’d find out? What did I think you were hiding?"
"You know, I was about your age when my father killed himself. I don’t know if Michael told you."
"It’s a monster concerto. A huge responsibility."
"Each man kills the thing he loves, and Michael had killed what lay coiled in his head."
"That kind of tenderness couldn’t be permitted to last. Nothing that beautiful could live long."
"Those times were so much more real, those people more alive than people today."
"The living had a deadness now, where the dead had been so alive."
"This was a flat in the sixteenth, off the Avenue Foch."
"But what of her own shredded bathing suit of a soul?"
"She could not do what Meredith was planning, just lock the house and leave town without a forwarding address."
"The moon rose above a bank of clouds, the great grinning Oz of a moon. Was that God, she wondered, just the man behind the curtain, working His cranks and levers?"
"Did he know just where he was going? Or did he rent a car from the National counter at the Ambassador Hotel and just spin the keys?"
"She couldn’t remember the last time she felt lucky."
"Easy enough to die in Fontana, you could lie down on the tracks and be divided neatly, top and bottom."
"The brave thing was to admit it. To say, I have fucking had enough."
"She thought of Pen, growing up out here, scrappy mad and dreaming of LA so hard she could taste it."
"The wind batted from the left, always the left, like a one-armed boxer."
"You couldn’t swathe yourself in goose down when you were taking it all the way."
"She understood people who’d choose to live like that, isolated in a dry, hard terrain, so far from comfort."
"She wasn’t planning on sleeping but she dozed off, listening to the wind."
"He wanted to be loved purely, simply. No expectations."
"They thought they’d found the safe place, the good place, that knowing how to dress and what to order would save them, but they were still out here in the night, swatted by the same giant hand."
"The landscape left you absolutely to yourself, it was zero embodied."
"The desert left you absolutely to yourself, it was zero embodied."
"Once the worst had happened to you, all the rest was just stuff and absence."