Violet Young

We’re free, at least for a few more days, but we don’t seem to know how to let loose the way the teenagers do, the way we used to. We find it harder to lie, harder to conceal bad deeds.

Here’s a way to get over someone: live a monastic existence, appreciating the wideness of an unshared bed, and write songs or books or unclassifiable material about them until the material itself becomes more interesting than the person ever was.

Listening to the same music over and over is closing down, opening little windows of the self only to the parts of the world one likes best: bits of the past, certain people, certain feelings.

My life was a mess. It helped to hear a person confront his own mess, a row of fallen dominoes, to the backdrop of such transportive and sad music.

Our friendship might be too precious to disrupt, but the pain of not disrupting it is intolerable.

I want to be the type of person who’s too busy to be sad and lonely, so busy the sadness evaporates.

I knew how deep his mind could really go: these languorous weeks and the music that he’d chosen to accompany them had proven it. And I knew how deep I could go, and I wanted him to know.

There is an order here — the shifting tides, the stubborn shooting stars — and however it works, whatever is controlling it, doesn’t need our help.

There should be no expectations of you and me beyond what is possible for us here: the use of the senses over the use of the mind. Brain over mind, body over civilization.

My soul never stepped inside another person’s so easily as it stepped into yours. I felt safe in there. Nothing changed. I was just physically there with you. It was a world without mirrors.

It seems that any woman he gazes at for more than two seconds become ensnared in his workaday web, spun out of boredom and sexual desire. Who can blame him for spinning it?

I had a creeping fear that our world is turning into a more individualistic world and that we should all try harder to fight this shift. This fear has propelled me for quite awhile. It’s seemed noble, worthwhile. But still the doubt kept crushing me.