Robin > Recent Status Updates

These days he was relieved that there was no one to witness his own physical changes: the spreading calloused feet, the slightly bent shoulders, the irrelevant penis. He could no more think of undressing in front of her than he could of exhibiting his gracelessness in public. For she would not be kind.

His life, in retrospect, seemed very long and quite uneventful. Yet it had been occupied with struggle, with the no doubt modest but nevertheless taxing struggle of finding a place for himself in the world.

He approved all the more of Mrs Lydiard inasmuch as she appeared to live alone, like himself, and did not seem to have been driven mad by it.
...
Mrs Lydiard, for all her careful glamour, had something resolute about her, as if there were no one to share in the mighty task she faced in keeping herself afloat.

Only a few paragraphs in, and I'm getting the feeling that this may be ... very bad. Very bad!

I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you.

And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.

"Hm," she would say. "Sounds very odd to me. I can't see anybody wanting to read about such a lot of deadbeats."

then,

"If you must write, find something that interests other people. You can't expect them to be interested in a lot of nuts."

:D nothing like a non-reader to comment on a writer's subject!

Sometimes the effort of putting pen to paper is so great that I literally feel a pain in my head, as if all the furniture of my mind were being rearranged, as if it were being lined up, being got ready for delivery from the storehouse.

It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy.

Fenby felt already a strong dislike for rich men who inconsiderately purchased poison by which they themselves met their own end. It could only be called downright careless.

But afterward, after she had gone back to her own room, depression came to him, and what had seemed like such a hell of a time became distasteful, even a little disgusting. It was the depression of surfeit, the tail of selfindulgence's kite. You flew high, wide, and handsome, imposing on the breeze that might have wafted you along indefinitely; and then it was gone, and down, down, down you went.

You've got no time at all, but it seems like you've got forever. You've got nothing to do, but it seems like you've got everything.
You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven't moved hardly, they've hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they've measured off a half? two thirds? of your life. You've got forever, but that's no time at all.