✦ Book Society ✦

I know everything. I thought and whispered my way through it all while lying on my own in the dark back then ... Argued my way through every point, down to the last little mark, the last little jot, and I know everything, everything! How sick and tired I was of all this empty talk! I wanted to forget it all and start again, Sonya, and stop wittering! Surely you don't think I went there like some idiot, without a moment's thought? I went there like a man with brains, and that was my downfall! Can't you see that I must have know that if I'd already started asking myself the question, "Do I have a right to power?", then it already meant I didn't. Or that if I asked, "Is a human being a louse?", then man was certainly no louse for me, only for someone to whom the question never occurs, and who sets off without asking questions ... And if I'd already tormented myself for so many days wondering, "Would Napoleon have gone or wouldn't he?", then I obviously knew that I was no Napoleon ... I endured all the agony of the empty talk, Sonya, all of it, and now I just wanted to shake it off. I wanted to kill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone! I didn't want to lie about it, not even to myself! It wasn't to help mother that I killed — nonsense! It wasn't to acquire funds and power that I killed, so as to make myself a benefactor of humanity. Nonsense! I just killed. I killed for myself, for myself alone; and whether I'd become anyone's benefactor or spend my entire life as a spider, catching everyone in my web and sucking out their vital juices, shouldn't have mattered to me one jot at that moment! ... And it wasn't so much money I needed, Sonya, when I killed; not so much money as something else ... I know all this now ... Try to understand: taking that same road again, I might never have repeated the murder. There was something else I needed to find out then, something else was nudging me along: what I needed to find out, and find out quickly, was whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a human being. Could I take that step or couldn't I? Would I dare to stoop and grab or wouldn't I? Was I a quivering creature or did I have the right...?

She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

"Dear old world," she murmured, "you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you."

The sparrow is sought after by many monsters, but she is cunning and resourceful, and she always wins.

“Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?”

There are hurts. I feel them all over, like stab wounds: the distance that we both allowed to settle in, ruining what should have been the happiest year of our lives. The ring that makes me feel like a fraud because it’s so huge. As ridiculous as it might sound, in my mind he gave me such a big diamond as a way of saying I love you THIS much!; but how could he have loved me THAT much when we still didn’t completely know each other? When we’d never argued before and didn’t live together and it was such smooth sailing. Way too good to be true.

Even if neither of us ever did anything interesting in our entire lives, it wouldn’t matter. You don’t need to be special or significant to have value. You’re just important, always, and people either see that or they don’t. They either love you, or they don’t.

For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

Lily couldn't see anything, couldn't think of anything except maybe this was how she died. I hope Leo finds the money, she thought. I hope he finds it and buys the ranch in my honor and lives there alone with the horses and Nicole. I hope he never fucking gets over me.

but i was still lying and I knew it. i lie to myself all the time. but i never believe me.

“Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was.”

"you're so hateful." "i learned at your feet."

Conlan looked at me, his face desperate. “Ice Age animals!”