words.amniisia.com

It was foolish to feel any emotion in response to an advertisement for soda pop, but when its image had dimmed, I thought to myself, They're all dying now, our fathers and our mothers - the immigrants and the exiles, the soldiers and the refugees, the boys and the girls - of "yore."

As he aged, he agonized over the disintegration of the neighborhood he had known and once said that one of the most overlooked evils in the world was loneliness.

"Blowing up is not the same as breaking down and, as we've said before, even breaking down can have its purpose, its meaning. You held yourself together for a long time, but tolerating cracks is part of being well and alive."

"Getting old is fine. The only problem with it is that your body falls apart."

Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad.

We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others.

Time is a question of both percentages and belief. If half your life ago you were six of seven, the span of those years is even longer than fifty for a centagenarian, because the young experience the future as endless and normally think of adults as members of another species. Only the aged have access to life's brevity.

"... it would have been nice if he had been a little different, but he wasn't, and there were so many good days along with the bad days and sometimes the very thing I wanted to change about him one day was the thing that made another thing possible another day that was good, not bad ..."

Not telling is as interesting as telling, I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside, can be so excruciating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

... in her experience far more men have the gift for forgetting women than women have for forgetting men.

... a single story with seven characters can also be seven stories, depending on the identity of the narrator.

She was a true stoic; if there's nothing to be done about it, away with it.

... it is well known that the dead often go to their graves wrapped up in lies.

"That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we're sure of."

"Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs."

I knew that if I wasn't careful, the secret ... could fester like a sore. I also knew that I had to keep it. Nothing would come of confession, except my own relief.