words.amniisia.com

My immediate response is indignation: this is exactly the problem I have been writing about! Reductionism, labels. On second thoughts, though, I have to accept that if we didn't slot things into categories we'd never find what we were looking for.

Self-pity is a great teller of boring tales. I was at a turning point, with nowhere to turn.

Every illness is a narrative. What matters is the version you tell yourself.

Illness, I realised then, like love, or hate, draws everything to itself, turns everything into itself.

Less and less am I planning to try anything anyone suggests. If these solutions worked, everyone would be using them: there'd be no chat rooms and no problem.

The attraction to the net, I'd often thought, was so strong because this was the only place where people could, in anonymity, get together and bellyache.

It seems I'm always thinking, but never paying attention.

Language builds domes, then other domes over them, as the first dissolve. Because words are never still. The opening of a sentence projects you forwards; the end demands you have the beginning in mind. One paragraph leads to another and this page to the next. The eye is ahead of the lips. Reading, we turn the page while the last lines of the one before are still falling into place. Typing, my thoughts run ahead of my fingers. Driven on. Never now. Never grounded in this moment.

To think an object is not to perceive it. To text a girlfriend is not to be with her. You lose your grip on things as they are.

Life is not in novels. The novels that most compellingly keep us away from life are those that most accurately, intensely and wonderfully imagine it and replace it for us, the novels of Dostoevsky and, yes, of Lawrence, of the truly great writers. But the novels themselves are not life and we don't go to them for life. If it's life we want, we put the book down.

... an understanding that much of the pain we feel comes from our reaction to pain, much of our agitation from our excitement with agitation.

Was I the object of some clever hypnotic suggestion? But if it was hypnotism, would I be able to wonder if it was hypnotism?

We all want to add another episode to the narrative of our selves, the yarn we are constantly spinning of our dealings with the world.