Status Updates From Shine On, Bright and Danger...

Reading comeback

“You have to commit experience to your heart and let it change you.”

“Assumption only looks safe; there isn’t any safe and painless way to love. You have to stand and deliver, as the highway robbers say.”

“You can suspend thought, but you can’t stop yourself from thinking.”

“No matter with what stealth you approached passion, no matter how long the waiting time spins out before it erupts, it is the soul of impatience, and recklessness lives right in the heart of it.”

“What arrangements people construct in the name of love are as formal and artful as any other product of human devotion. You figured them out as you went along, with an eye toward grace, as if you were writing a sonata, and the sense that propelled you was the goodness of the thing.”

“Pleasure requires high and loving spirits and energy, but living in the world—being battered by it—having your heart pierced, sharpens everything. I had grown up without knowing it, and now I knew. I knew that you might believe in rapture, but you had to earn the right to feel it. You had to pay for it with grief and loss, and it was worth it.”

“If I had thought about it, I might have realized that there are connections deep enough to terrify. But I didn’t think. If there was such a thing as pure feeling, this was it.”

“There are things that you know in your blood or in your cells and when they happen they make perfect sense, but the perfectness of that sense makes you reel.”

“At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.”

“There is something horrible about available emotions. Overuse cheapens every time.”

“It is probably easier, and more comprehensible to the world, to act as if your instincts were dictated to you from a greeting card than to know what your natural course is and set out on it. Sentimentality is a second-string emotion, along with jealousy, envy, and righteous indignation. You can assume the second string at will and the world sobs right along with you.”

“You can’t miss what you don’t know about.”

“We were too young, too available. We had what we wanted and there was nothing to fight for.”

“Never be sorry for the way you feel”