Cheryl > Recent Status Updates

Then I discovered words: I discovered their receptive and even memorable readability, and harbored many printed in prose and verse. Some—still—accompany my solitude; the pleasure they inspired has become a second nature to me.

He wasn’t like so many people, who, through laziness or a feeling that their social eminence obliges them to stay within their own circle, abstain from any other pleasures that life offers them beyond that social sphere where they remain in self-imposed confinement till the day they die…

“Every so often you feel that unless you look at the world and at people from a new angle your mind will get blunted.”

To be able to part from something, he thought as the train started moving, you had to confront it in a way that created internal distance. You had to turn the unspoken, diffuse self-understanding it had wrapped around you into a clarity that showed what it meant to you.

Is it the same with others: that they don’t recognize themselves in their outside? That the reflection seems like a stage set full of crass distortions? That, with fear, they note a gap between the perception others have of them and the way they experience themselves? That the familiarity of inside and the familiarity of outside can be so far apart that they can hardly be considered familiarity with the same thing?

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so in fact.

In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in destitution—never— no one. For destitution a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible.

but no one can demand more of life than that life do him the honor to demand that he learn to live with his fears, and learn to live, every day, both within his limits and beyond them.

I enter by your eyes
you come forth by my mouth
You sleep in my blood
I waken in your head

I walk through the days, the trampled moments
I walk through all the thoughts of my shadow,
I walk through my shadow in search of a moment,

We must sleep with our eyes open, we must dream with our hands

What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.

Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing.

That was when I was young and full of grand dreams. Now I’ve given up hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.”

Only a few people here in Berlin know my secret. I tell more people than I used to, but I’m not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I’ve just met. In other cases I keep silent forever.

Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.

He had been the only completely satisfying thing in her life, and it didn’t seem possible for one who had pretended to love her as much as he, suddenly to become so completely indifferent.

She had lived to herself for so long, had been shut out from the stream of things in which she was interested for such a long period during the formative years of her life, that she considered her own imaginative powers omniscient.

Facts exist objectively, regardless of whether or not you believe them.

He had never set great store by words, expecting the people he loved to read him through his silences. When he had to talk openly, he often hinted at things; when he had to disclose his emotions, he concealed them even more. Perhaps death was scary for everyone, but more so for the one who knew, deep within, that he had lived a life of pretences and obligations, a life shaped by the needs and demands of other people.

She wasn’t naive enough to expect fairness from a world so crooked…but she believed that everyone had a right to a certain share of dignity. And inside your dignity, as if it were a patch of soil that belonged to no one else, you would sow a seed of hope. A tiny germ that one day, somehow, might sprout and blossom.

The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very center; it can only spin faster from now on.

Tell me what is green and earth and rain,
what is mud and sky but do not tell me with words.

It’s strange how sometimes a man forbids himself to do things he really wants to do, things that are completely harmless and simple and natural.

It doesn’t seem right to me to tell someone what other people say when he isn’t there. Neither the good nor the bad. Not even the good, because then the absence of the words he hasn’t heard puff it all up and butter it and sweeten it and make it into something quite different from the truth.

Always in the period before going home, Mercia finds her nose twitching to various smells: onions sizzling in a pan, a patch of dug earth, or infuriatingly, something she cannot identify that nevertheless transports her to the Cape. From which she chooses to infer that the world is much the same all over, that we necessarily rely on nostalgia, the trace that connects us to the past.

If nowadays ambition cannot accommodate the old notion of home, there has surely always been ambivalence, the impatience for something new, for moving on, across the world, whilst at the same time, at times, feeling the centripetal tug of the earth.

Perhaps in the privacy of her room, when she lay alone in her bed, she felt a profound relief, now she would not have to bear the heavy load of her dreams; it was no longer necessary to keep alive the character she had invented to represent herself, nor constantly juggle facts to mask the weakness of a lover who had never lived up to her illusions.

“A man whose greatest pleasures were English breakfasts and DIY. A dull man. An old man. And yet...good. He was a good man. And good might not amount to much, good might not light up a life, but it is something.”