abbey walker > Recent Status Updates

“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.”

“I expect a lot of the people I love —too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist.”

“All women think they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong.”

“It’s true I’m headstrong. I take the bit between my teeth. I don’t calculate. Maybe I should’ve learned to compromise if it hadn’t been for all those disappointments.”

“When you love someone, you must give the people he loves credit for being of some value.”

“My mother said the doctor held me by my ankles and announced, “ANOTHER FINE SOLDIER FOR JESUS!” And I say FUCK YOU to those first words said to me!”

Caconrad

“‘Going bad is something that happens over a longer period of time.’
How long a period of time is that?”

“It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had a chance upon a dear old friend.”

“Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”

“Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition.
Giving up is a revelation.”