Then, the loneliness had been offset by busyness, by pride and by hope. Now, it was offset only by routine.
(about Mary, p 41)
I was fairly lonely in my homeland but at least I was interested in what was going on around me. Here in my self-imposed exile, I just keep going on, thanks to inertia and defiance.
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After all, the point at which one becomes old is surely the point at which anticipation is overwhelmed by hindsight.
(Alice, p 188)
Related to the above. Back then I was aging; now I’m aged.
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There was also the strange, simple fact that her life was no longer a
shared event. Anticipation, it turned out, was more difficult to sustain
alone. A sense of purpose, of direction, was more difficult to sustain
alone. She had lost, almost entirely, that sense of moving forward, of
progress. She had lost her own sense of narrative.
(Alice, p 188)
That’s one of the hardest aspects: you can’t talk about the things, good or bad, which are important to you, because you don’t believe the people you would like to tell them to would care, and you’re still not in the stage where you’ll bore any stranger just to get them out of your system.
So you just blog, even if nobody reads it.
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[….]
He seemed so passive; not just today but always, as though his whole
movement through life had been guided by decisions that were not his
own. He was pushed this way and that, like a fictional character
controlled by a malicious author.
(about Terry, p 322)
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So much of his life was dictated by habit, he sometimes thought. Habit, punctuated by the uncontrollable and the unpredictable.
(David, p 326)
In fact my attempt at emigrating to my homeland was the only major attempt in my life to do more than just protect the status quo against unfavourable changes in circumstances making it even worse.
(originally posted probably on WordPress)
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