Outline Quotes
"I always remembered that, how inevitable it seemed and yet how silly."
"Life is sending you in one direction and you’re pulling away in another."
"Success takes you away from what you know, while failure condemns you to it."
"I suppose it’s a bit like marriage, you build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated."
"It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions."
"It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know."
"What I miss, Ryan said, is the discipline itself."
"Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures."
"The enduring nature of repulsion, while beauty was seen once and never seen again."
"There is no such thing as an unblemished childhood."
"There was no such thing as a life without pain."
"Everything falls away, try as you might to stop it."
"It is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see."
"The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public."
"What you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of."
"It is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you."
"The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite."
"Once there were no more things to add or improve on, the journey would seem to have run its course."
"Life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness."
"The parts of life that are suffocating are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires."
"Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams."
"Political awakening had been the awakening of my whole sensibility."
"Perhaps the best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume."
"It was a sound that was menacing while also being curiously beautiful, so long as you couldn’t see its source."
"I find that I still can’t forgive her for the way in which she deliberately used a moment of vulnerability to extract something from me."
"The reality of my life is largely concerned with what are called middle-class values."
"I would like to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this."
"For the first time in years he knew what he wanted."
"I began to feel excited too. The thought of relenting, and of the love I would receive if I did, was almost irresistible."
"We should be living, she said, not spending more time thinking about books."
"My novels and leather-tooled volumes were untouched: only Habermas had been attacked."
"Through them, we access the story of ourselves."
"It’s always different in a new place, but it’s rarely better."
"I didn’t know what to expect – you never do know what to expect on these occasions, do you?"
"I reminded myself on the way here to imagine the worst and it obviously did the trick."
"It was a bit exhausting but she needed the money."
"It was nice, she said, looking around again, to be pleasantly surprised."
"This question of adaptation, therefore, might be said to be at the forefront of her mind."