abbey walker > Recent Status Updates

“That is what AIDS is after all, isn’t it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappear. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the fuck you going, piece by piece, until all of you is gone. I swear to God at one point I used to think people with AIDS just evaporate.”

“And where you belong, and your right to say that you matter. Sometimes I wish I could feel that shit just once, you know? What it feels like to take just one part of my life for granted, even if it’s just a fucking breath, man. Even if it’s just a fucking breath.”

“I have to have something to show at the end of this life. If I’m for hell, then I deserve a love that was worth it.”

“It’s set on Skye and there’s hardly a Scotsman in it. It’s a particularly English talent, that. The ability to visit foreign places and yet always think of yourself as the most interesting thing there.”

“And yet, who could not look upon fools and envy them for their frivolity?”

“You cannot escape from the world more certainly than through art, and you cannot bind yourself to it more certainly than through art.”

“Our dialogue was a dialogue between mirrors, each reflecting the other. There was nothing to exchange.”

“From the moment I had started to read seriously, I had forced myself through all the major novels, the longer the better. I had read demanding philosophical texts. I had even made myself read poetry. Any gaps in my knowledge disturbed me: I would have hated to have been asked a question for which I had no answer.”

“Our world was vacant, exhausted. The literary result was what now encircled us, a never-ending chain of weak, bloodless confections with their pitiable first-person narrators. An alliance of mediocrity. A consensus of denial. Everyone was a hypocrite and a fraud. What they call equality was a leveling. Now we had to lie and pretend that everything was good when it wasn’t.”

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?”

“Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn’t in time.”

“Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.”

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”

“In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.”

“To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

“When a child first catches adults out – when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just – his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone.”

“Friendship has a way of re-revealing the things you know, in such a way that you can’t help but accept them. Books can be such a friend, too— shedding light on a feeling the reader has already felt in order for her to see it more clearly, or differently.”

“And there it was, that honeyed disdain that can develop between two people who know each other intimately yet still fall short of telling the most intimate truths.”

“‘Your fault was believing that love could last.’”

“Still, I did ask him whether he thought me intelligent. Yes, undoubtedly; but intelligence is not a quality with an independent existence: when I go on and on pursuing my obsessions, my intelligence is no longer available to me.”

“I have taken to my pen again, not to go back over the same ground but because the emptiness within me, around me, it’s so vast that this movement of my hand is necessary to tell myself that I am still alive.”

“It is as though he were appalled at having hurt me and yet afraid of giving me too much hope. Should I settle down definitively into despair? But then he would quite forget what I was once and why he had loved me.”