"I'm not looking at you, though it might seem that I am. I'm looking back through my life, and my friend's death is what's important to me. It changed"I'm not looking at you, though it might seem that I am. I'm looking back through my life, and my friend's death is what's important to me. It changed me, gave me this slightly defensive expression which only a few people see through. If you hold the pages of my journal up to the light you'll see contrasting, inter-relating images dealing with him. If you hold this one up you'll find my head is full of the words of another writer. I'll say anything, I suppose, that keeps me out of the jail of my own heart, where I might run into my thoughts about him, like the white lies I told nurses so I could stand by his deathbed for ten seconds way back when. I learned my lesson. I just can't see him as dead. All I can see is what's great about him, though that's all caked up in artifice now, and cloaked in recent history's scariest light. His eyes were circled, deep brown, neither friendly nor wary of anyone. Mine are bright blue and possibly evil in their search through the recesses of friends' private parts while they sleep forever."...more
"It was all that was left of my past life, when I had been young and personable, the blood had coursed in my veins, everything was ahead, everything w"It was all that was left of my past life, when I had been young and personable, the blood had coursed in my veins, everything was ahead, everything was then and now, there was no yesterday or tomorrow, and now there is no time at all, tomorrow is not a word I can pronounce, there is no now really, and yesterday I never think of except as dance music. All I have is the letters, the applicants, and the dance hall, and none of them is real. I do not even believe in death because what I am is emptier than death itself."...more
"'I looked at you for a really long time,' he said, 'but I still don’t know you.'""'I looked at you for a really long time,' he said, 'but I still don’t know you.'"...more
"So there’s someone exactly like you. In that mirror. Am I right? Another you. You like you were before that awful thing happened."
What if we all kill"So there’s someone exactly like you. In that mirror. Am I right? Another you. You like you were before that awful thing happened."
"What we went through together was far too intense, self-incriminating, and confused to rethink, much less put into words.""What we went through together was far too intense, self-incriminating, and confused to rethink, much less put into words."...more
"His feelings, thoughts, etc., were the work of people around him. Men particularly. The first made a weirdly detached person out of his body and mind"His feelings, thoughts, etc., were the work of people around him. Men particularly. The first made a weirdly detached person out of his body and mind when he was thirteen or something. The next man corrected his predecessor's mistakes."...more
"No matter how far I've come, it's never far enough. The pattern was already in place.""No matter how far I've come, it's never far enough. The pattern was already in place."...more
"If we must have an animal as a national symbol, why not a pangolin, something original that we can own. Like many Sri Lankans pangolins have big tong"If we must have an animal as a national symbol, why not a pangolin, something original that we can own. Like many Sri Lankans pangolins have big tongues, thick hides and small brains. They pick on ants, rats and anything smaller than them. They hide in terror when faced with bullies and get up to mischief when the lights are out. They are hundreds of thousands of years old and are plodding towards extinction."...more
"'Would you expect to see yourself in him?' I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble m"'Would you expect to see yourself in him?' I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me."...more
"What had happened between Shehan and me over the last few days had changed my relationship with her [my mother] forever. I was no longer a part of my"What had happened between Shehan and me over the last few days had changed my relationship with her [my mother] forever. I was no longer a part of my family in the same way. I now inhabited a world they didn't understand and into which they couldn't follow me."
"From time to time, in an encounter or an omen, or in a particular series of happenings, I think that I recognize the working of fate, but too many pa"From time to time, in an encounter or an omen, or in a particular series of happenings, I think that I recognize the working of fate, but too many paths lead nowhere at all, and too many sums add up to nothing. To be sure, I perceive in this diversity and disorder the presence of a person; but his form seems nearly always to be shaped by the pressure of circumstances; his features are blurred, like a face reflected in water. I am not of those who say that their actions bear no resemblance to them. Indeed, actions must do so, since they alone give my measure, and are the sole means of engraving me upon the memory of men, or even upon my own memory (and since perhaps the very possibility of continuing to express and modify oneself by action may constitute the real difference between the state of the living and of the dead). But there is between me and these acts which compose me an indefinable hiatus, and the proof of this separation is that I feel constantly the necessity of weighing and explaining what I do, and of giving account of it to myself."...more
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