Giovanni's Room

• YY

  2023-05-11
  What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships, wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find my self. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.
• YY

  2023-05-11
  I had said it lightly, with a smile, out of a desire to put myself in terms of an acquaintance with wintry things, on an equal footing with him. But the fact that I had said it as he held me hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy.
• ways and means

  2021-08-01
  I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.
• ways and means

  2021-07-03
  With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
• 高地浮星

  2021-02-08
  Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the gaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
• Chandler

  2018-04-20
  For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened ...
• 莫羡

  2016-10-17
  "I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel."
• 无脊椎

  2014-07-02
  Part IIp139You do not know, do you, what it is like to lie awake at night and wait for someone to come home? But I am sure you do not know. You do not know anything. You do not know any of the terrible things---that is why you smile and dance the way you do and you think that the comedy you are playing with the short-haired, moon-faced little girl is love.p141``You do not,' cried Giovanni, sitting up, ``love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror---you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe emph{diamonds} down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody emph...
• 莫羡

  2016-10-26
  And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.
• 苏夫佳

  2015-11-23
  I will not forget the last time he looked at me. The morning light filled the room, reminding me of so many mornings and of the morning I had first come there. Giovanni sat on the bed, completely naked, holding a glass of cognac between his hands. His body was dead white, his face was wet and grey. I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginning of an earthquake, and felt, for an instant, that I was drowning in his eyes. His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and...