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Even if we left tomorrow, we would be here eternally, repeating consec. utively the moments of this week, powerless to escape from the consciousness we had in each one of them—the thoughts and feelings that the machine captured.

“When all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges. That was to be expected. When Madeleine existed for the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine herself was actually there.”

The habits of our lives make us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world. Now reality appears to be changed, unreal. When a man awakens, or dies, he is slow to free himself from the terrors of the dream, from the worries and manias of life. Now it will be hard for me to break the habit of being afraid of these people.

My love for this woman has become annoying (and ridiculous: we have never even spoken to each other!).

So I was dead! The thought delighted me. (I felt proud, I felt as if I were a character in a novel!)

Fifth hypothesis: the intruders are a group of dead friends, and I am a traveler, like Dante or Swedenborg, or some other dead man of another sort, at a dafferent phase of his metamorphosis, this island may be the purgatory or the heaven of those dead people.

I felt very depressed. The effort needed to kill myself was superfluous now, because with Faustine gone not even the anachronous satisfaction of death remained.

I began to realize that the words and movements of Faustine and the bearded man coincided with those of a week ago.

The atrocious eternal return.

You have awakened me from a living death on this island.

I have found that I usually imagine that things are going to turn out badly.

I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.

“Imagination is the core of desire. It acts at the core of metaphor. It is essential to the activity of reading and writing.”

“I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other.”

“Space reaches out from us and translates the world.”

- Rilke, “What Birds Plunge Through Is Not the Intimate Space”

I have the uncomfortable sensation that this paper is changing into a will.

Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.

I was a difficult, mean bitch, whose cat, it was rumored, bit men. (And whose cat did.) I lived on a street in the middle of Hollywood with an abundance of palm trees and my orange sunsets over the jacaranda branches.

My sister is now working on the question "How do you love someone and not take them personally; not care?" I told her that when she figured out the answer to tell me, and I promised not to tell anyone.

Since I've started carrying a book everywhere, even to something like the Academy Awards, I've had a much easier time of it, and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback. Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has saved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.

It must have been his basic mediocre brain that drew people to him; he was like an animal who's too much of an animal to comprehend the inevitability of his own death, and that kind of person is always a comfort.

Designers don't live in apartments like most people, or studios like artists; they live in "spaces." "How do you like my space?" they ask, showing you some inconceivable, uncozy, anti-Dickens ode to white, chrome, and inch-thick glass.
"But where do you sleep?" I wonder, nervous.
"There's a space up those stairs," I'm told.

There is something fascinating about a person's face when they're not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing Pleasure is a lure. When you're smiling, the whole world would rather smile with you and have another watercress sandwich than ponder the universe with an ex-Beatle.

The funny thing was that I'd always believed that sex masterpieces were the best kind. Better than Bach, the Empire State Building, or Marcel Proust. I believe that most people put ninety-eight percent of all their creative energy into trying to stage marvelous love scenes.

The features that define this eros have already emerged in the course of our exploration of bittersweetness. Simultaneous pleasure and pain are its symptom. Lack is its animating, fundamental constituent. As syntax, it impressed us as something of a subterfuge: properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.

On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case. If we look carefully at a lover in the midst of desire, for example Sappho in her fragment 31, we see how severe an experience for her is confrontation with the beloved even at a distance. Union would be annihilating.

"I wonder," I said to my mother, "if I’ll ever get married."
"Well, if you do," she said, "marry someone you don't mind."

A long time ago my mother and I were driving to a wedding. I had been engaged to both the groom and the best man at one time or another. I'd broken off with both of those guys because I was impatient with ordinary sunsets; I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky and I was missing it.

“The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will. The individual’s total vulnerability to erotic influence is symbolized by those wings with their multisensual power to permeate and take control of a lover at any moment.”

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.