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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“Was he evil? I've spent a lot of time wrestling with that question. In the end, I don't think he was. Most people believe suicide is a choice, and violence is a choice; those things are under a person's control. Yet we know from talking to survivors of suicide attempts that their decision-making ability shifts in some way we don't well understand. In our conversation, psychologist and suicide researcher Dr. Matthew Nock at Harvard used a phrase I like very much: dysfunction in decision making. If suicide seems like the only way out of an existence so painful it has become intolerable, is that really an exercise of free will? Of course, Dylan did not simply die by suicide. He committed murder; he killed people. We've all felt angry enough to fantasize about killing someone else. What allows the vast majority of us to feel appalled and frightened by the mere impulse, and another person to go through with it? If someone chooses to hurt others, what governs the ability to make that choice? If what we think of as evil is really the absence of conscience, then we have to ask, how is it a person ceases to connect with their conscience?”

“Was he not supposed to be suffering for what he did to my heart? I couldn’t bear the thought of him living his life somewhere as if nothing had happened. I wanted to find him, confront him, ask the reason for breaking my heart. But then, I realized it was pointless. He wouldn’t have any answers I wanted to hear. There was nothing out of character in his treachery.”

“Was heute den Partnern belanglos oder gänzlich undenkbar erscheinen mag, kann anderntags bereits das unwiderrufliche Aus der Beziehung bedeuten.”

“Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.”

“Was I (am I not still?) a victim of words and books merely, and are books just an excuse for living, living things out in parenthesis, even in the most desolate stony place as I was, quotations and misquotations raining down on me thick and fast – words, words, words – the multitude of words, a parody of rain? For after all, as old Mrs Feany said, the rain is healthy. And the rain it raineth everyday. But the stuff of books and solitude and spying on the poor, could they be healthy? Or were my doubts the real heresy and treason? What book ever changed the world? It seems a solipsism to say that what changes the way we see the world, changes the world, but it is not. Where do you want me to begin? The Bible, Das Kapital? The Divine Comedy, The Satanic Verses?”

“Was I better? Before Shropshire I'd felt broken, as though I would fall should the scaffold of my work be removed. I didn't feel that now, but there was a fine crack through the middle of me, and I suspected it might never mend. I remembered Lizzie apologising to Mrs Lloyd the first time she stayed to chat, for the chip in the cup. 'A chip doesn't stop it from holding tea,' Mrs Lloyd had said.”

“Was I heartbroken or furious? I didn’t know. I did know: that’s it. Our relationship could not continue like this, out of balance, unequal. And as surely as I knew this, I knew something else: But of course it can. We can continue to live exactly as we do right now, in a heavy-lidded state of love and unspeakable compromise. Isn’t that what people do? Every day? Don’t they ache but rename it tired? It made me wonder: Was it even fair to expect the person you’re with to be just as happy as you? Furthermore, how could you ever even know for sure? You couldn’t, was the truth of it. You could not know this.”

“Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.”