Alfred Hayes > Quotes

“We go from disappointment to disappointment, from hope to denial, from expectation to surrender, as we grow older, thinking or coming to think that what was wrong was the wanting, so intense it hurt us, and believing or coming to believe that hope was our mistake and expectation our error, and that everything the more we want it the more difficult the having it seems to be.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“She inhabited a world from which I was excluded, and she had left me in an immense empty space.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“There were times when I would forget her, though they were rare, and it would be for a time as though she had never existed; and then some passing girl's inadvertent gesture, or an accidental profile, or a hat like hers, would restore her, and restore the suffering too, and I would long again, somehow, to encounter or to see her.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“The sick constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Yes, the man said, I've often wondered why I impress people as being altogether sad, and yet I insist I am not sad, and that they are quite wrong about me, and yet when I look in the mirror it turns out to be something really true, my face is sad, my face is actually sad, I become convinced (and he smiled at her, because it was four o'clock, and the day was ending and she was a very pretty girl, it was astonishing how gradually she had become prettier) that they are right after all, and I am sad, sadder than I know.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“The only thing we haven't lost, I thought, is the ability to suffer. We're fine at suffering. But it's such a noiseless suffering. We never disturb the neighbors with it. We collapse, but we collapse in the most disciplined way. That's us. That's certainly us. The disciplined collapsers.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Tu único vicio, pensé, eres tú mismo. El peor de todos. El que de verdad es incurable.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“El sufrimiento me daba una importancia que ningún otro sentimiento me había proporcionado. Era como un destino. Al sufrir creía que amaba, porque el sufrimiento era la prueba, el testimonio de un corazón que hasta entonces consideraba seco.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Nada de lo que deseamos ocurre exactamente como lo deseamos, amor o metas o hijos, y de desilusión en desilusión vamos de la esperanza a la negociación, de la expectativa a la renuncia, y al envejecer pensamos o llegamos a pensar que el error estuvo en desear con una intensidad que nos hirió, y creemos o llegamos a creer que tener esperanza fue un error y que nuestras expectativas fueron equivocadas y que cuanto mayor es el deseo de algo más difícil es obtenerlo.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Did I want her? I thought to myself. Suppose, now, she were to change her mind: Did I want her? Of course not, I assured myself. Was her loss important? How stupid to imagine it was. Nothing of any significance had happened. It was simply that my own life was so barren, or seemed so barren; the temporary possession of her had given me the illusion that it was not, while I had her, barren; now that she was gone, the barrenness that she had temporarily helped to conceal lay exposed. It was because we thought so much that love could save us, that having nothing else but the dry labour of our work we looked so anxiously towards love. It was our ridiculous phoenix.
To suffer, or to experience a suffering for the loss of a girl who had no importance, was absurd; I was absurd because I was suffering; it was something that required hiding away because of its absurdity.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“How intolerable now the weight of what I was seemed upon me. How subtle a punishment life had devised. Often I felt as though my own pain had cornered me in some room and I was alone with it, like some animal that was inescapable.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“I had no idea what a delicious feeling it was, to be free, to be absolutely unconcerned about whether one loved or didn't love. It was such a bore, loving. Being so concerned, so dreadfully afraid of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. She was so glad to be rid of it, all the concern.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“All I knew, really, was that she had taken away with her when she had gone something which in the past had held me together, some necessary sense of myself... For without whatever it was, I seemed poor, depleted, injured in some mysterious way; without it, there was nothing to interpose between the world and me.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Perhaps it was the anticipation, that moment sustained by the drive home, when one is in a taxi with a stranger who is about to be transfigured into a lover,and there is an interval, as in music, when the chord of desire has been struck, and the chord of the fulfillment of desire hasn’t; when everything remains suspended and anticipatory, and the snow falls through the air of a city whose ugliness is temporarily obscured, and the cab itself seems to exist inside a magical circle of quiet heat and togetherness and motion; and, I suppose, for that moment, it is beautiful: the snow, and everything.”
― Hayes Alfred

“I really didn’t have a good vice. Liquor in moderate quantities. Love on the installment plan. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could really cultivate some impressive vice? Some excessive cruelty or some astonishing sacrifice.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“And besides, love: there were so many other emotions which weren't love at all, but which masqueraded as love, or assumed its name; didn't she agree?”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Failure was always present; it changed its aspect, acquired new forms. Did one ever go from success to success? But one went, simultaneously, from failure to failure. What was it that I'd once thought intolerable? In a few years, it had become tolerable. The reasons for living changed. At the end, the great pang would be that death deprived one of the very, very simplest things; the simpleness of sight, the mechanical marvel of breathing. Ah, she mustn't feel the way she did. Nothing catastrophic had really happened. What one was good at didn't always and continually give one pleasure. Appetites died; ambitions expired; desire put on a different skin.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“She could not really go until she could feel that her loss would be important. Perhaps if she had been totally convinced that I would be properly broken hearted she might have been able to end the affair with less than the difficulty it ultimately cost us. The portrait I drew of myself was always unflattering (but was it really unflattering? Wasn't it, actually, by insisting so on my inaccessibility making myself more attractive?)”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Why didn't I go back to New York? New York, New York; she'd never had any luck with anybody from New York.
I was going back; she needn't worry about that.
Soon?
Soon enough.
Please, sooner than that.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“I'd have chosen another life if I were a pretty girl. Would I? she said; I'd have to be a pretty girl first, and then I'd have to choose among the possibilities open to a pretty girl. They weren't so various; not really. They may have looked various, to someone who wasn't, but there weren't so many choices when you knew”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things to coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be. Whatever money did, it didn't do the things it was popularly supposed to do, and I thought I could speak with a certain minor authority on the matter because [...] I no longer spoke with the suspect voice of poverty. My hostility, if there was still hostility in me toward the rich, now seemed to flow from another source: a feeling, not quite identifiable, that there was something sinister about the way these people lived. But then, how could this life possibly be sinister? What harm could there be in the Braque bought in an art shop in Paris and now featured over the low couch against the pale wall? What danger could accrue from the immense albums of records stored in the living room or the den with the brick fireplace and the spotless desk? Why should it strike me darkly that a huge refrigerator, with Coca-Cola perpetually on ice, and the grapes kept perfectly cold by a servant, stood on the patio beside the thirty-foot pool? Why did I persist in reacting so oddly to all their comforts, their acquisitions, their rarities, their cool, large and enviable homes? The fault, most likely, was in myself; they weren't, perhaps, sinister at all. It was only a kind of voracity which struck me so, an insatiety that gave off, perhaps, a slight aura of the sinister.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“I really didn’t have a good vice. Liquor in moderate quantities. Love on the installment plan.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Lo único que no perdimos, pensé, es la capacidad para el sufrimiento. El sufrimiento nos sale bien. Pero es un sufrimiento silenciosísimo. No molestamos a nuestros vecinos con él. Nos desplomamos, pero nos desplomamos con la mayor disciplina imaginable. Así somos. Sin duda, así somos. Desplomadores disciplinados.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Nothing catastrophic had really happened. What one was good at didn't always and continually give one pleasure. Appetites died; ambitions expired; desire put on a different skin.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“Did I know a buyer? Someone interested in second-hand souls? Someone who'd care to exchange?”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“I knew that she had wanted what I was not prepared to give her: the illusion that she was safe, the idea she was protected. She had expected, being beautiful, the rewards of being beautiful; at least some of them; one wasn’t beautiful for nothing in a world which insisted that the most important thing for a girl to be was beautiful.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“No estaba hecho para retener a nadie. La gente se me escapaba o la perdía. Era incapaz de sentir una injusticia por mucho tiempo, ni siquiera una sensación de haber sido traicionado. No se equivocaba. Las cosas eran menos reales para mí que para ella. Yo existía entre fantasmas cuya naturaleza prefería no considerar fantasmal. La verdad, no creía en esas heridas que parecía haber sufrido. Algo en mí las disolvía. La justicia estaba de su lado. Yo era tan incapaz de ser un villano como lo contrario de un villano. No era completamente esto ni lo otro. De alguna forma, todos mis deseos se desarticulaban y todas mis justificaciones dejaban de ser verdaderas.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Al fin y al cabo, ¿no es lo que queremos?
Las cosas en su lugar; cierto orden; una sensación de bienestar, verdadera o falsa, una tarde en la que suceda algo.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love