The first taste of longing was the saddest thing in the world.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

To forgive someone, one would have to be convinced that they'd made some effort to change the disastrous course that genetics, class or upbringing proposed for them.

When you're young it makes a difference to meet people who are kind, however rarely [...] Incidents of kindness get thrown into sharp relief.

It was a terrible shock to me when I realized I was getting too old to die young anymore.

He knew that however much trouble he put into repairing himself, like a once-broken vace that looks whole on its patterned surface but reveals in its pale interior the thin dark lines of its restoration, he could only produce an illusion of wholeness.

Only when he could hold in balance his hatred and his stunted love, looking at his father with neither pity nor terror but as another human being who had not handled his personality especially well; only when he could live with the ambivalence of never forgiving his father for his crimes but allowing himself to be touched by the unhappiness that had produced them as well as the unhappiness they had produced, could he be released, into a new life that would enable him to live instead of merely surviving.

Neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened.

Switchblades of memory that had flashed open all his life reappeared and silenced him.

Most people either feel regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.

It's just sad to spend so long getting to know someone and explaining yourself to them, and then having no use for the knowledge.

My experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can't.

I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth.

What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional.

It felt nostalgic and significant, but left him in a state of nebulous intensity, not knowing whether he was remembering an image from a film, a book, or his own life.

The scale was wrong, like places remembered from childhood and dwarfed by the passage of time.

[...] a sense of nostalgia for a period that hade made up for some of its unpleasantness with its intensity

If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, "Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", so we can have some decent family entertainment!

He was worn out by his lifelong need to be in two places at once.

He felt the familiar ache of trying to track something that had just disappeared off the edge of consciousness but could still be inferred from its absence, like a whirlwind of scrap paper left by the passage of a fast car.