|
bfa0092
|
Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.
|
|
love
happily-ever-after
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
73e236d
|
How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
b777ef7
|
It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
998e0a8
|
He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
cee32b4
|
You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.
|
|
ours
stupid
night
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
a84b370
|
The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.
|
|
musician
music
artist
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
477d879
|
She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds."
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
4add3bd
|
The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
580de5d
|
Every secret is a wrinkle.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
c3a4f9a
|
All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
691e730
|
No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded that you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, p..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
6042a62
|
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man who with those words issued a license to misery to millions of underexperienced teenagers and thousands of overeducated middle-aged jackasses."
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
4067b89
|
He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air the..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
62d40aa
|
Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding wit..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
bb692b8
|
He had no illusion that this was bittersweet or somehow necessary to make art. It just burned. Anyone who felt this would take their hand off the stove at once, but he was locked in position, inches from the source of his pain, for as far into the future as he could see, because if he was going to be a musician, if he was going to protect the one profound and real thing about himself, the one thing he loved besides her (but which only she m..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
1b96e13
|
But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
f8a3853
|
So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?" "I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere." "Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them."
|
|
truth
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
4937573
|
But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements--alimony and acrimony--the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD ..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
d28b69a
|
How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
9661ce3
|
If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
9136681
|
There was probably a range of people she had never experienced in this world and for which she had no preparation,
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
a324e8f
|
Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug.
|
|
dogs
humor
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
fce5b7a
|
He might say he had made a mistake in moving to this foreign city--it had seemed like a good idea in California, but now where else could he go?
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
819f54e
|
Charles Gabor sits with four other westerners, an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness--five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
b6210a5
|
and when he finally did break, he would take with him his contagious restlessness and dissatisfaction and guilt, his little gestures and phrases and attitudes that stank of their parents and the past, and Scott would relax again and prove to himself that he had settled all that, left if far below him.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
fe5e44f
|
Are you still awake?' he might ask in the intimate whisper of 3 a.m. lovers who half arise, warm and happy, to find they have been in someone's company during all those lost hours of sleep.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
96108bc
|
He would tell himself he had momentarily gone mad and forgotten why he existed. Do not forget again and you will never feel so lost again, he would remind himself, confident in his memory's ability to be permanently fixed.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
f8ef019
|
John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling, of taking the wrong things seriously.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
46d247e
|
There is no "grand scheme of things." That's just a bullshit disguise for cowards. The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future's approval.' (Todd, the marine)"
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
0094b14
|
Nadja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbably but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nadja's must exist; he had read enough to know this was true.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
946a48a
|
The most important day of your life, a wonderful moment, but know it as it happens, you feel like God himself is holding you up in his hand. (Imre)
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
f263327
|
Shakespeare's lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
ced47e1
|
To feel at home. To be at peace. To know one's desires are truly one's own and not inadvertently, unavoidably, just the desires of one's forebears long dead or, worse - worst of all - the manipulations of faceless Habit, Style, Tradition, History. To go somewhere because it would be warmer, to live and just to be. With the right person for the right reason, like this very moment, so that even this place, this historyless little grocery coul..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
e4218cd
|
he] understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
67dc93b
|
says the brave and tearful mother hustled over from subconscious central casting when recollection fails.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
d3fb762
|
the orange circle faded to a coiled spring of dully glowing grey.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
7e6a076
|
he] understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
80a28b5
|
Boy, how can you think it wise to truck with this culture of death?" Even at ten I knew the correct answer to that cataclysmic catechism: "Right you are, Father. Much better to stick with the life-embracing imagery of a cult that worships a bleeding corpse nailed to bits of wood." ... Egypt was not -- I must repeat for Readers who still do not know it -- a culture of death, for all the mummies and bottled lungs, the jackal-men and cobra-que..
|
|
immortality
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
b0258bf
|
In my experience of human behaviour (and I've seen all there is to see, it's fair to say), I've concluded there aren't but five motivations for a man to do anything. They're hardly mysterious, you know: money, hunger, lust, power, survival. That's all there is. You hear in the courtrooms and in the cinema all sorts of fancy-dress explanations why someone becomes Prime Minister or kills his neighbours. But if you listen hard, it's all just t..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
2daab3c
|
Unrequited love is not fatal, it's just a temporary digestive disorder that leaves no visible marks, only a newly acquired but permanent inability to ever eat certain specific, unnecessary things again without having terrible digestive distress. Shrimp gives me gas, so I don't eat shrimp. I don't sit up nights crying about shrimp, right? All right then. Have two aspirin and a full glass of water, remember?
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |
|
f0b067e
|
an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness-five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another. Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized cafe table: a moment of total insignificance, and not without a powerful whiff of cl..
|
|
|
Arthur Phillips |