I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Confronted by too much emptiness … the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
Immortality,’ said Crake, ‘ is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be.
I’m a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one’s life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
