spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal. (Location 31)
Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, (Location 46)
Note: Michon in wintder mythologjes sskociates this with an early attempt of paganism to understand god - the conversion of an empty pgan space to one swith meaning
flipping on the light in a stranger’s bathroom one presumed to be white but which was, in fact, robin-egg blue; (Location 133)
“He found the world drab, and was upset by flaking paint and other blemishes; he liked bright colours, but became depressed when they faded.” (Location 137)
If he hadn’t lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is. (Location 175)
This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can’t answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. (Location 177)
“We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object”—this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there—not just yet. I believed in you. (Location 204)
One image of the intellectual: a man who loses his eyesight not out of shame (Oedipus) but in order to think more clearly (Milton). I try to avoid generalities when it comes to the business of gender, but in all honesty I must admit that I simply cannot conceive of a version of female intelligence that would advocate such a thing. An “abortion of the mind, this purity” (W. C. Williams). (Location 211)
Loneliness is solitude with a problem. (Location 270)
chicken—a young doctor inside asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10—I was flummoxed, I felt as though I shouldn’t be there at all—I said “6”—he said to the nurse, Write down “8,” since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say “11,” he said. I didn’t believe him, but I supposed he might know. (Location 319)
That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. (Location 326)
“The sadness will last forever.” I imagine he was right. (Location 347)
Note: Pialat
“There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed. (Location 352)
After reading this I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between “a blinding, bad time” and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. (Location 356)
