Quotes
A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.
p. 311
I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.
"What you think you've lost can neither be lost nor found. Don't let it go."
p. 722
Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy. Sure, I'd gotten tired of this tiny space, but I'd had a good home here. In the time it takes to swill two cans of beer, all had had sublimed like morning mist. My job, my whiskey, my peace and quiet, my solitude, my Somerset Maugham, and John Ford collections-all of it trashed and worthless.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.The truth is you will be.
And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live.
Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.
[B]
March 14, 1969
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
p. 543
It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than what you have lost.
It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about.
It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.
