"It isn't that you repress
anything. It's just that I am all things
Hugo creates the space for me to be. And
I don't always want to get my space from him.
I want sometimes to be altogether new."
"But
if someone else came along, you'd just get a different space from him. It's a silly daydream, Nellie, so undignified
and egocentric. You really want someone
else because of what they do to and for you.
Perhaps we all do. How
appalling. So ignoble; perhaps we should
do without."
"No,
because then you're just left your horrible self, watching it and checking up
on and it and taking its temperature.
Living with someone at least is a relief from that."
--p. 45
"And
then she wondered if she hadn't perhaps married Hugo to protect herself from
them, and so she wouldn't have to go through these things -- long forgotten as
they were -- the humiliations and terrors of love."
--p. 98
"But
it seemed to Nellie that the picture wasn't about that, but about dread and not
naming things, or not seeing them wholly and hence dreading them."
--p. 135
"Because
she would be asked to consider once again whether marriage, with its built-in
guarantee of emotional boredom, with its almost guarantee of sexual deception
was such a good idea when there was single life available, with its guarantees of sexual and emotional boredom, of
course, and spiritual degradation and so on, both to be weighed and considered
and compared until in the end all deviations from the ideal are just forgiven
in exchange for the pleasures of forgetting."
--p. 151
"The
consequence of revelation was change; one might have to live one's life
differently if such things were to be taken seriously, or if one allowed one's
mind to accept the wisdom of the body."
l--p. 155
"Well,
I suppose I was wanting there to be one [affair] that would completely cast me
and Hugo out, like ghosts, so that I could go on with someone else. Really in order to be someone else
myself. You become in a way what they
need you to be, what they've chiseled you down to or built you up to, you know,
and you end up suspecting that there are a great number of other ways possible
for you."
From The Furies:
"...was
gone over line by line, look by look, even in the moment, at least in the
beginning, those hot and intense, even awful moments of simultaneity when one
was simply trying to survive the emergency of actual coexistence with the
beloved."
And re writer's solitary routine:
"All
the symptoms of his current loneliness and depression I read as choices, heroic
and exemplary."
"Maybe
I knew enough about the costs of Jack's spartan life, though it wasn't till
much later that I knew it up close: the
purposeful deprivation that allows you to work, the cultivation of dullness so
that writing can be an escape from it, the only pleasure in an unpleasured
world, really only the cessation of pain of being there, that place you have
pulled down around you, made empty and ugly with loss. I certainly understood his depression and
melancholy."
--p. 199
"I
really meant to settle down with Ned as I had vowed, but the smallness of our
current life -- his emotional absence from it, which left behind for us little
but habit and loveless intimacy -- was enough to make me feel the 'not yet' --
it can't be all over yet. There were
these circumstances and there were the ordinary ones of any long-term
relationship, the limitations and reductions of what is possible in the light
of what has always been, the increasing claustrophobia of the known. Given the ghastly smallness of longtime
intimacy, who hasn't longed for the crash in the china shop of the affair, the
created clean uncluttered space where one may act, impersonate one's best self,
do the little dance of how one might be if one were free, if life were other,
if this other were one's life?"
--p. 200
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