Luke Davies > Quotes

“When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't...”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“Once upon a time, there was Candy and Dan. Things were very hot that year. All the wax was melting in the trees. He would climb balconies, climb everywhere, do anything for her, oh Danny boy. Thousands of birds, the tiniest birds, adorned her hair. Everything was gold. One night the bed caught fire. He was handsome and a very good criminal. We lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. It was the afternoon of extravagant delight. Danny the daredevil. Candy went missing. The days last rays of sunshine cruise like sharks. I want to try it your way this time. You came into my life really fast and I liked it. We squelched in the mud of our joy. I was wet-thighed with surrender. Then there was a gap in things and the whole earth tilted. This is the business. This, is what we're after. With you inside me comes the hatch of death. And perhaps I'll simply never sleep again. The monster in the pool. We are a proper family now with cats and chickens and runner beans. Everywhere I looked. And sometimes I hate you. Friday -- I didn't mean that, mother of the blueness. Angel of the storm. Remember me in my opaqueness. You pointed at the sky, that one called Sirius or dog star, but on here on earth. Fly away sun. Ha ha fucking ha you are so funny Dan. A vase of flowers by the bed. My bare blue knees at dawn. These ruffled sheets and you are gone and I am going to. I broke your head on the back of the bed but the baby he died in the morning. I gave him a name. His name was Thomas. Poor little god. His heart pounds like a voodoo drum.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“When you think you are in love, you don't want to know about the things that could end it.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly
off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“Comfort is beauty muted by heroin. Sadness is beauty drained by lack of it.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”
-In the yellow time of pollen”
― Luke Davies

“I am so far removed, from everything, that I can’t even cry. There’s a chasm between me, where I am, and the world I am in. The world I move my feet through. The atmosphere I breathe is like golden syrup, twenty-seven atmospheres thick. I’m wading through the world, consumed with … consumed. And I’m wading through the swamp that my body has become.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“And I come to realise that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“You're beautiful, but you're somewhere else. That's okay. I can handle that. But we won't continue as friends, not just now. I like you as a lover, not a friend.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“If time stood still, and
we could choose the
time, the best time,
then love without
pain would be all I
know.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“I'm hurling all the little joys against the greater sadness. The sadness is a giant weight. It presses down. Its mean: "What's the point?”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“Very quickly I begin to understand the selfishness of my love, the inappropriateness of my relationships, when I realise that every time I fuck it feels as if I am wrestling with demons.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“I learnt too late that what is most important to us is always most precious at the moment it occurs, and it is precious in its absolute immediacy and not as some vague confirmation of future directions; since the only certain fact, aside from death, is the flimsiness of everything.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.
And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Drought brings out the worst in us and it's easy to hate your fellow human beings.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“If I could find someone to blame, perhaps I could get angry. Anything would be better than this sadness, this sense of regret for events that were never mine.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“In the presence of their love I sensed my lonliness, and I understood for a moment, clearly, that deep and basic human desire for companionship at depth.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Was it possible to feel love with an empty mind? For if the mind was empty, then it was empty of love too.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“She told herself that life is short. This didn't mean that nothing mattered, only that when strange things happened there was often no turning back.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“That's all that faith is, the knowledge that the greater thing is with you. That's all the faith you need. The knowledge that you are not the greater thing.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It was all about eyes, the truth.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“What is love, in the beginning, if not this mapping out, this settling into the other's undulations?”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“The very concept of solid ground is a myth. The galaxy itself is adrift.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator

“It's just that you reach a point where metaphors become indistinguishable from the things they represent. And the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. And it feels like being born”
― Luke Davies, Isabelle the Navigator