Some of my favorite paragraphs from a yarn spinner for the record books.
“It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say 'This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.”
“Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”
“Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we're on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you'll all but guarantee an easier path, because it's a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there's a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say "All right then, I have tried" and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and until that last moment, you shouldn't accept anything, you should make things better.”
“I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given.”
“The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic.”
“We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering.”
“The thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.”
“Neighbours, as Jesus knew, can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone’s Christianity.”
“I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given. At moments you’re aware of it balanced on your tongue, but not what comes next. Something like that. I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you’ve lived this long you must have learned something, so you open your eyes before dawn and think: What is it that I’ve learned, what is it I want to say?”
“That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.”
“The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my own life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality.”
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