Quotes from Jonathan Lee

At the age of eighty-three he had the self-awareness necessary to be patient with other people, but not always the facility to disguise the effort.

There are certain grudges that are every bit as irrational as they are uplifting. A person must protect them at all costs, especially in old age.

His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet.

Viv used to say there were two types of person in life, past tense and present tense. Viv had seen herself as a present-tense person, which gave her an excuse never to discuss what she felt about a thing that had already happened.

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

New York didn't set out to charm you. It was like God that way. You had to bring a lot of the enthusiasm yourself.

He would go looking for it everywhere in the years to come. Love, love, love. As if it were a coin to be found in a field, or a park. As if it could be obtained without forfeiture.

So yes, he could be funny. If you thought such things were funny. And the coffee had to be made with a specific number of beans. He could taste any errors in arithmetic.

Love. This was the way not to fall into forgetting. Love, and a good publicist.

She hated this feeling, the sensation of trying and failing to get her arms around something big. The way political opinions seemed always to be expressed with a total sureness of tone. The way that sureness was at odds with every true thought she'd ever had.

It is always better to clear the air, even if the air often stinks.

How do we picture the past? Does it become clearer as it drifts into the distance? Can it be seen from more angles, a better vantage, with finer instruments for optics, and more supporting documentation to draw from? Or has its essence already vanished, leaving space for lies to multiply and thrive, spreading across paperwork that is good for nothing except, perhaps, a nervous acting captain's next snack?

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

There may be mistakes in the choice of means to attain an end. But success or failure also involves much that lies beyond our power. We are not responsible for the inevitable, nor for a knowledge that is beyond our reach. Solely the ends, honestly chosen, and consistently sought, determine the moral quality of a life.

If you pay too much attention to time, in certain tedious moments, it slows down to punish you.

All the best paintings made you see various levels of reality at once. They sent you inward as well as outward.

A revelation is like a sneeze. Sounds unlikely, but it is. It can be lost, can simply vanish, if one does not look straight into the light and ask the inside to come out.

Two turtles dressed in their shells. This

I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are not out of. Their whole being is sheltering behind walls of muscle and bone. Everything they are - and are not - exists within their sacrosanct headspace.

She was here to get rich and richer and then get out from under these men, not to accommodate mediocre mumbling coves. A man should be able to afford his own expulsions.

He loved New York. He hated it. It was a cathedral of possibilities, it would never settle down.

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

Mother died when he was twelve. He did not want sympathy, he only wanted her back.

Every murder needs a murderer, just as every egg invites a spoon or knife. The thin white shell would not make any sense unless breakage was part of its plan.