John’s Reviews > My Struggle > Status Update

“ If I was asleep, I was asleep. Once I had thought it was a sign that I wasn’t a real writer. Writers slept badly, had ravaged faces, at the crack of dawn they sat at the kitchen table staring out the window, tormented by their inner demons, which never rested.
Who had ever heard of a great writer who slept like a child? ” (851).

“The connections that hold us back ... as it were, have to do with expectations and obligation, with what the world asks of us, and sooner or later ... we realize the imbalance of honoring the world’s demands while the world fails to honor ours. At that point we become free, we can do as we please, but what has made us free, the meaninglessness of the world, also deprives that freedom of its meaning,” (381-2).

“A sliver of the feeling that could come over me at night, when the lights changed in the empty streets without anyone there to see them, implanted itself in my mind like a note slipped under a door. The image it conjured, which I could so vividly entertain, was of a world without people,” (375).

“To be human is to be several …. the heart is a bird in the chest … the hand is a crab and the hair a haystack …. It is because the teeth are a stone wall and the eyes apples … and the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still …. It is because we are blood. It is because we must die. Death, that great restorer of stillness,” (367).

“To be human is to be several …. the heart is a bird in the chest … the hand is a crab and the hair a haystack …. It is because the teeth are a stone wall and the eyes apples … and the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still …. It is because we are blood. It is because we must die. Death, that great restorer of stillness,” (376).