Oliver Zelman > Recent Status Updates

“I know these days are offering me only murder for my future. It is not just the creeping fingers of the cold that dissuade me from action, and allow me to accept the hypocritical hope that there may be some solution.”

It kinda reminds me of that Rilke quote on accepting the unresolved longing in your heart

“But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.”

“He met Diane at Bennington” well that’s not a good start…

We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of the moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table

“Why is the measure of love loss?”

“She felt sorry for him; often her pity left her defenseless when he wasn’t suffering at all and she merely thought of him in connection with some object which to her mind stood for her own past despair: a washbasin with cracked enamel, a tiny electric hot plate, blackened by boiled-over milk.”

“everything in her life had conspired to inculcate a kind of love that remains fixated on a particular irreplaceable object.”

“AA both isolated the alcoholic from everything that wasn’t AA and made the alcoholic see him or herself as perpetually sick, the ‘slip’ being guaranteed.”

“I said that Quintana did not go to a college with a strong, or even any, core curriculum. She went for two years to Bennington, then transferred to Barnard, but by then a certain amount of damage had been done.

‘The most unstructured environment possible. She was the classic wrong candidate for Bennington or Sarah Lawrence, from everything I know about her.’”

“She was always in her mind the ‘victim’ of other people.”

“When you hear someone resist AA in a strong way — and the most typical line of resistance has to do with ‘all that God business’ — you have to look for the reason they’re resisting. And in one or another version, it always comes down to their not being ready to give up the support they get from drinking.”

“Why do I have to be sick for the rest of my life?”

“the most foreseeable with hope for some hidden thing concealed inside the opacity of stillness”

“unformed phrases slide into tight folds of sorrow”

“This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival; for if I did not forget, I should die. The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory (like Werther).”

“And I don’t belong to you. / Both of us mourn now. / But like Orpheus I know / life on the side of death, / and the deepening blue / of your forever closed eye.”

AHHHHHHH

“In this short Life / that only lasts an hour / merely / How much — how / little — is / within our / power”

“after being diagnosed you are forever separated from you had come to view as your life or living, the world outside the eyes. The calendar tracings of biographical continuity get kind of screwed up. It’s like watching a movie suddenly and abruptly going in reverse a thousand miles a minute like the entire landscape and horizon is pulling away from you in reverse in order to spell out a physical separation.”