S.J. Watson Quotes

I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn't feel ashamed.

She looks so young, so hungry, her eyes full of possibility, of what is in store for her.

I am frightened to discover my past. What I have achieved, and what I have not.

It's perfectly possible to hold two opposing points of view in the mind at once, oscillating between them.

It's not life, it's just an existence, jumping from one moment to the next with no idea of the past, and no plan for the future.

We sat opposite each other across a table that swam with spilled coffee, warming our hands on our drinks.

Men always say I LOVE YOU as a QUESTION

I could think of nothing, nothing to say, nothing to feel. My mind was empty.

I asked for this, I thought, at the same time as I never asked for this. Is it possible to both
want and not want something at the same time?

Pain, or pleasure. I could not tell where one ended and the other began.

I am sliding, down,down. Toward blackness, I must not sleep. I must not sleep.I.Must.Not.Sleep.

It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.

Chrissy," she said. Her voice was quiet, measured. I thought I detected something in it, some new emotion. Fear. "Describe Ben to me.

What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

But, I realized, these truths are all I have. They are my past. They are what makes me human. Without them, I am nothing. Nothing but an animal. I

And then, when there is nothing else between us but love, we can begin to find a way to truly be together.

There is so much,I thought,just under the surface. So many memories, darting like silvery minnows in a shallow stream.

Is it possible to both want and not want something at the same time? For desire to ride with fear?

Work. Write. Read. Keep putting words on the page, because that's the only way you'll get better.

Thoughts race, as if, in a mind devoid of memory, each idea has too much space to grow and move, to collide with others in a shower of sparks before spinning off into its own distance.

There was a letter, tucked among the pictures. It was addressed to Santa Claus and written in blue crayon. The jerky letters danced across the page. He wanted a bike, he said, or a puppy, and promised to be good. It was signed, and he had added his age. Four.
I do not know why, but as I read it, my world seemed to collapse. Grief exploded in my chest like a grenade. I had been feeling calm - not happy, not even resigned, but calm - and that serenity vanished, as if vaporized. Beneath it, I was raw.

He put his hand on mine. I fell into him, knowing what he would do, what he must do, and he did. He opened his arms and held me, and I let him embrace me. "It's okay," he said. "It's okay.

We're constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

There are memories I am better off without. Things better lost forever.

I have no choice but to face whatever my reality has become.

I am an adult, but a damaged one.

These snatched moments. Kneeling in front of the closet or leaning on the bed. Writing. I am feverish. It floods out of me, almost without thought. Pages and pages. I am here again now, while Ben thinks I am resting. I cannot stop. I want to write down everything. I wonder if this is what it was like when I wrote my novel, this pouring onto the page. Or had that been slower, more considered? I wish I could remember.

I guess sometimes it's not so much about how long you've known someone, but about what you've been through together.

Do you trust me?
The question is usually asked before an admission that such trust is misplaced.

He forgave you though,' said Claire. 'He never held it against you, ever. All he cared about was that you lived, and that you got better. He would have given everything for that. Everything. Nothing else mattered.

I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd fought for you. I was weak and stupid.

I think of my sponsor. Rachel. "Addiction is a patient disease," she said to me once. "It'll wait for your whole life, if it has to. Never forget that.

Whatever enjoyment I might have had at the time would disappear overnight like snow melting on a warm roof.

We're wearing masks, all of us, all of the time. We're presenting a face, a version of ourselves, to the world, to each other. We show a different face depending on who we're with and what they expect of us. Even when we're alone it's just another mask, the version of ourselves we'd prefer to be.

I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.

... I feel like he's taking advantage of me. Advantage of my illness. He thinks he can rewrite history in any way that he likes and I will never know, never be any the wiser. But I do know. I know exactly what he's doing. And so I don't trust him. In the end he is pushing me away, Dr. Nash. Ruining everything.

We both pretended to attach no significance to what had happened, and so revealed just how much significance there was.

I saw his eyes go up and he looked past me, toward the door, as if he were watching it, waiting. But there was no one there, it did not open, no one left or came in. I wondered if he was actually dreaming of escape.

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

The hands on the shoulder, then the hug.The mouths that find each other through the tears.

I will never abandon you. I love you too much.

these truths are all I have. They are my past. They are what makes me human. Without them, I am nothing. Nothing but an animal.

Progress? You call this progress?" I was almost shouting now, anger spilled out of me as if I could no longer contain it. "If that's what it is, then I don't know if I want it." The tears were flooding now, uncontrollable. "I don't want it!" I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless.

This is dying everyday. Over and over.

Everything seems different now. The room I am in looks no more familiar to me than it did this morning when I woke up and stumbled into it, trying to find the kitchen, desperate for a drink of water, desperate to piece together what happened last night. And yet it no longer seems shot through with pain, and sadness. It no longer seems emblematic of a life I cannot consider living. The ticking of the clock at my shoulder is no longer just marking time. It speaks to me. Relax, it says. Relax, and take what comes.

Two wrongs don't make anything right, but maybe they make things more equal.

I want him to be happy. And I want you to be happy, too. Even if you can only find that happiness without me.

I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.

I closed my eyes and he kissed my eyelids, barely brushing them with his lips. I felt safe, at home. I felt as if here, against his body, was the only place in which I belonged. The only place I had ever wanted to be. We lay in silence for a while, holding each other, our skin merging, our breathing synchronized. I felt as if silence might allow the moment to last for ever, which would still not be enough.

We are in a restaurant, smilling, leaning in over a half-eaten meal, our faces flushed with love and thr bite of the sun.