“Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed.”
― The Elephant Tree
― The Elephant Tree
“As they ate and played, and talked and told jokes, as they fished and wrestled, as they walked in the woods practicing Tatiana’s English and swam naked across the river and back, as he helped her with their laundry and the laundry of four old women, as he carried the water from the well for her and her milk pails, as he brushed her hair each morning and made love to her many times a day, never tiring, never ceasing to be aroused by her, Alexander knew that he was living the happiest days of his life. He held no illusions. Lazarevo was not going to come again, neither for him nor for her. Tatiana held those illusions. And he thought—it was better to have them. Look at him. And look at her. Tatiana so ceaselessly and happily did for him, so constantly smiled and touched him and laughed—even as their twenty-nine moon-cycle days spun faster around the loop of grief—that Alexander had to wonder if she ever even thought about the future. He knew she sometimes thought about the past. He knew she thought about Leningrad. She had a stony sadness around her edges that she had not had before. But for the future, Tatiana seemed to harbor a rosy hope, or at the very least a sense of humming unconcern. What are you doing? she would ask him when he was sitting on the bench and smoking. Nothing, Alexander would reply. Nothing but growing my pain. He smoked and wished for her.”
― The Bronze Horseman
― The Bronze Horseman
“I understand my parents quite well. They think of a wife as a man’s luxury, which he can afford only when he is making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of this view of the relationship between man and wife, because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract from the man because of her more favourable social rank . . . Which”
― Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc²
― Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc²
“I guess you are happy now, being the loneliest star in the night
Like you always wanted to be
and I being the only guy who wishes for it”
― The Prose will be forgotten
Like you always wanted to be
and I being the only guy who wishes for it”
― The Prose will be forgotten
“The estate was immaculate, but parts of it felt unused.
Not neglected, exactly—just sealed. Like they’d been
closed off intentionally.”
― Secrets
Not neglected, exactly—just sealed. Like they’d been
closed off intentionally.”
― Secrets
Forrest’s 2025 Year in Books
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