“If I'm not swimming as hard as I can, feet thrashing at the waves, I'm drowning.”
Source: If You Could See the Sun
“My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.”
Source: A Little Life
“I have lived a long time," she said. "And the longer I live, the more it surprises me, and saddens me, how wise the young must become to live in this world.”
Source: The Spear Cuts Through Water
“We walked down the back stairwell into the garden where the old breakfast table used to be. 'This was my father's spot. I call it his ghost spot. My spot used to be over there, if you remember.' I pointed to where my old table used to stand by the pool.
'Did I have a spot?' he asked with a half grin.
'You'll always have a spot.'
I wanted to tell him that the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court, the orle of paradise, the whole place, would always be his ghost spot. Instead, I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. When there's a breeze and they swell and I look up from down here or stand outside on the balcony, I'll catch myself thinking that you're in there, staring out from your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when I found you on the rock, I've been happy here. You're thousands of miles away but no sooner do I look at this window than I'll think of a bathing suit, a shirt thrown on on the fly, arms resting on the banister, and you're suddenly there, lighting up your first cigarette of the day—twenty years ago today. For as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot—and mine too, I wanted to say.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“You sound so miserable.”
“All novelists are.”
“Love's language is imprecise,
fits more like mittens than gloves.”
Source: Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters
“What does this say about the life you've lived, then?'
'Part of it— just part of it —was a coma, but I prefer to call it a parallel life. It sounds better. Problem is that most of us have— live, that is—more than two parallel lives.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“And then it hits me: I've lost you. You now rank among the things I'll always regret: opportunities lost, children never had, things I might have accomplished or done far better, lovers who have come and gone.”
Source: Enigma Variations
“The problem with loneliness is that, unlike other forms of human suffering, it teaches us nothing, leads us nowhere, and generally devalues us in our own eyes and the eyes of others.”
Source: Forgotten Fire
“Walking away from my desert companions feels like cutting off a limb. How does one say good-bye to an arm? One doesn't, I suppose. One pretends it isn't happening.”
Source: The Girl of Fire and Thorns