The Book Of Illusions Quotes
"Double or Nothing, the last of the twelve two-reel comedies he made at the end of the silent era, was released on November 23, 1928."
"It looked as though he had stepped out for a short walk and would be returning at any moment."
"He would have lived on in the things that were said about him, gradually turning into one of those symbolic figures who inhabit the nether zones of collective memory."
"The movies talked now, and the flickering dumb shows of the past were forgotten."
"Dead men don’t crawl out from their graves, and as far as I was concerned, only a dead man could have kept himself hidden for that long."
"A letter like that can’t be ignored. Once you’ve read it, you know that if you don’t take the trouble to sit down and write back, you’ll go on thinking about it for the rest of your life."
"We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen."
"Writing about comedy had been no more than a pretext, an odd form of medicine that I had swallowed every day for over a year on the off chance that it would dull the pain inside me."
"The moment Helen and the boys were killed, I had been turned into a rich man."
"Any choice would have been arbitrary by then, but that night an idea had presented itself to me, and on the strength of two minutes of film and one short laugh, I chose to wander around the world looking at silent comedies."
"They were like poems, like the renderings of dreams, like some intricate choreography of the spirit."
"My book had been born out of a great sorrow, and now that the book was behind me, the sorrow was still there."
"I wasn’t ready to let go yet. It had been only a year and a half, and I wanted my grief to continue."
"I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know what I wanted, and until I found a way to live with other people again, I would continue to be something only half human."
"The most plausible ones—that he had committed suicide or fallen victim to foul play—could neither be proved nor disproved, since no body was ever recovered."
"It had no charm or character, no lovingly wrought details to delude one into thinking it could ever become a home."
"To inhabit those blank, depersonalized interiors was to understand that the world was an illusion that had to be reinvented every day."
"There’s always a bigot around somewhere with enough hatred in him to murder a Jew, but a person who does that wants his crime to be known."
"The world was full of holes, tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could walk through."
"You have to go on looking into the eyes of this woman with the strange double face as we stood in that room, listening to the rain pound on top of us like ten thousand drums scaring up the devils of the night."
"The world is full of holes... and once you were on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life, free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you."
"Indifference of that magnitude is rare, and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to let go of who he is, it demands respect."
"Life was a fever dream, and reality was a groundless world of figments and hallucinations, a place where everything you imagined came true."
"No one’s going anywhere tonight. Not me, and not you either. We can talk about tomorrow tomorrow, but for now we both stay put."
"I have to be awake to hear what you’re going to tell me, don’t I?"
"Other people carried their humanity inside them, but I wore mine on my face."
"I talk only to the dead now. They are the only ones I trust, the only ones who understand me."
"You’re not going to let me down. And I’m not going to let you down. We both know that."
"Every word he spoke for the next fifty years was influenced by them, and they remained in his body for the rest of his life."
"You don’t drive an innocent girl insane, and you don’t make her pregnant, and you don’t bury her dead body eight feet under the ground and expect to go on with your life as before."
"If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it."
"In practical terms, O‘Fallon had handed over the operation of his business to Hector."
"He was so tired of the business by then, he never even learned the new stockboy’s name."
"Wallets were thin in 1931, but games were an inexpensive distraction."
"Boys would play ball no matter what the circumstances."
"Marriage was forever, and she wasn’t going to say yes until the right man came along."
"You have given me a great opportunity, and I mean to make the most of it."
"I cannot say. I always thought it was your decision, that you were the one who gave me my chance."
"Miss Nora suffer? Why on earth should she suffer?"
"Because she loves someone else. And who do you think that person is?"
"I believe that man is the measure of all things. Both good and bad."
"Take care of Nora, and then I can die a good death."
"You propose to her by the end of the month, or else I’m going to fire you."
"Every sentence a lie, and yet every word written with conviction."
"He couldn’t take the risk of being recognized."
"I have missed everything. I have misunderstood everything."
"If a man decides to crawl into his tomb, who better to keep him company than a warm-blooded woman?"
"Because I am not alone. Others live here, too, and I must not think only of myself."
"It seemed worth it to abandon some of my ideas about myself in order to give her a chance at life."
"It is not the worst thing that could have happened to me."
"Perhaps it will make them laugh. That would be a good outcome—to make people laugh again."
"Age doesn’t diminish these people. It makes them old, but it doesn’t alter who they are."
"Men don’t begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall."
"My skin had become a palimpsest of fleeting sensations, and each layer bore the imprint of who I was."
"You don’t work that hard at something unless you enjoy it, unless you feel that your efforts have some value."
"It’s only words. Thirty-seven pages—and nothing but words."
"It was a rash thing to say under the circumstances, a supremely vulgar and outrageous proposition, but time was short, and I didn’t want to leave New Mexico without knowing where we stood."
"To use a phrase I have always been fond of, I discovered that I was living on borrowed time."
"As we move through life, we leave behind three or four images of ourselves, each one different from the others; we see them through the fog of the past, like portraits of our different ages."
"I wasn’t sure if I had tricked myself into believing that I was strong enough to go on working—or if I had simply gone numb."
"In eight short days, she had brought me back from the dead."
"I have every intention of living to a hundred, but on the off chance I don’t get that far, all the necessary arrangements have been made."
"I often think about what happened the next day. So much of it turns on what was never said, on little gaps and silences."
"If that was the case, then Hector’s films haven’t been lost. They’re only missing, and sooner or later a person will come along who accidentally opens the door of the room where Alma hid them, and the story will start all over again."