Acts Of Desperation Quotes
"The first time I saw him, I pitied him terribly."
"I thought about him afterwards, and assumed he must have been passing through."
"His features of his face were lovely too, but it was the way he was structured that made you lose your bearings first."
"The thing to understand about Ciaran is not only that he was exceptionally beautiful, but that there was an immense stillness radiating from his body."
"By pity, what I mean is that just by looking at him I felt an acute tenderness for his condition: his being human."
"Ciaran was not the first beautiful man I slept with, or the first man I had obsessive feelings for, but he was the first man I worshipped."
"Do you think I am unaware of calling his body a place, a thing?"
"Taking my dopey gaze as agreement, he wrote his phone number on a napkin and gave it to me."
"Living alone, I began to split apart from myself in a deeper and more grotesque way than ever before."
"He sought nothing from his surroundings."
"Is it possible to love someone without knowing them, by sight?"
"It was the beginning of one such evening that the incident about his poems for Freja took place."
"I woke up terribly frightened all the time."
"I laughed at this nervously and shook my head, filled with affection for myself."
"What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be?"
"He was angry at a great many things, disgusted by more."
"I’ve never understood how people can love their bodies, nor really understood how they can hate them either."
"The need was a true and human part of me, but I could feel nothing else of myself to be true or human, and so the need seemed ungodly, an aberration."
"I can’t, and don’t much want, to make myself understood."
"Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own."
"It seemed to radiate heat, to throb, like a living thing."
"How dare you? I want to scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I’m sorry, on the other."
"I was filled not only with misery about what he was saying, and his awareness of it, but also with shame at how squalidly I was wasting my short life."
"I was sitting in a car with someone who loved me more than life itself, and yet all I could think about was Ciaran."
"There are experiences that lived only in me and could never be replicated or recounted."
"I looked down at Ciaran, frowning in his sleep."
"The idea of her having a long-held perception of who Ciaran was, which predated mine by years, was awful."
"Happy Christmas. I love you very much. Please call me."
"Her husband must have died, and this is the first Christmas without him."
"You are a beautiful woman and I love you."
"Every moment of my day was saturated by his absence."
"I need him. I can’t do it. I’m not able to do it."
"I had won. And how did I win? Oh, in its way, it was easy – it was nothing; I was nothing."
"It’s dumb to move to a different country and stay in the same place all the time, right?"
"Just tell me what you’re thinking and it will be OK."
"I want you to promise me you will never do this again."
"I would rather shit in front of them than eat chocolate in front of them."
"It wasn't my only desire but it shadowed all the others."
"I didn’t see why he should get away with so much."
"Someone who doesn’t like food will not respond convincingly when asked to evaluate different kinds of lettuce."
"I wanted him to have to explain it, out loud."
"I wanted there to be a thing he could not know."
"Sex with him began, slowly, to fail to excite me."
"I was able to perform my passion, having learned the movements so long ago."
"I thought this event would weaken his position."
"I drank more in front of him from then on."
"Then I came home to him pouring bottles of wine down the sink one evening."
"I felt the blissful wooze of being secretly, silently pissed."
"I kept looking, to find something, to justify the looking."
"But at night, when we had finished watching films or television...it was all worth it then."
"I had so missed listening to him say this thing."
"I had loved my father so fiercely for my entire life."
"I had given up so much to be a part of this drama."
"I was gripped by a sudden awareness of how terribly alone I was."
"I was doing something. I was finally doing something."
"I had never been as afraid as I was that morning."
"It was a nice pain, for it could be solved, I knew how to cure it."
"I felt sorry afterwards, not just for myself this time, but for the boy too."
"I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt."
"I felt sorry for whatever was wrong inside him."
"I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him."
"I would have carved his name all over me if I could have."
"I knew that I was bad, but nobody else did."
"The journey to the airport, having hastily packed up my things."
"I felt the incautious excitement I had as an eighteen-year-old."
"I was so myself, thinking of nobody but myself."
"I wanted to be near him, to absorb his surety."
"To let an entirely new thing take me over, which was the only way I would escape Ciaran alive, that woozy joy of being able to leave a whole life, my whole self, behind me in an instant."
"But I didn’t know him. But he was just another image."
"I would still be the same, I knew, no matter how badly I would have liked to believe otherwise."
"It might feel at first like I was leaving, swept up in a new, never-felt-before euphoria, but one day soon that theory would crumble."
"I would be leaving in desperation, not joy, would be bolting away from something as much as towards another."
"No, there would be no end to it that way. There would be no end to it unless I made one myself."
"The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain."
"It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so you could feel it heal."
"I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good."
"‘You didn’t tell me you wanted that,’ he said."
"I was crying still, not registering what he was saying, or what he was doing."
"‘This is what you like,’ he kept saying."
"It felt wrong to be speaking with another person, and one I could barely remember knowing."
"I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still."
"Is it brave to be alone? Maybe, in a way."
"How could I have asked him to love me, day after day, when the answer kept on being no?"
"I mourn for that braveness, which is gone."
"That night Mark kissed me and I let him."
"He kept touching me and eventually I did what I had to do to stop him from wanting to have sex with me, which was to have sex with him."
"When you change someone’s no to yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you."
"I was happy, as I always am in the sea, the only place I have ever found where my body feels natural and mine."
"When you love a person these things are nothing, or even lovable in and of themselves."
"I understood fully that certain weaknesses in others are intolerable – at least they are when you don’t love them."
"I knew then that Ciaran had not loved me."
"But it made it OK. It made it something I could live with."
"I swam until I was exhausted, my arms and legs getting so jellied that I struggled to return."
"It made me happy, how funny and touching they were, and how comfortable with one another."
"It made me so happy that soon I was crying at the luck I’d had in getting here."
"What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex?"
"But that was all right. That would follow."