Great Moments In 20th Century Literature

"I fell asleep on the night flight to Europe. A woman in the window seat, going out to the aisle, rubbed against my legs and awakened me. I thought: But that's Yvette. She's with me, then. I'll wait for her to come back. And wide awake, for ten or fifteen seconds I waited. Then I understood that it had been a waking dream. That was pain, to understand that I was alone, and flying to quite a different destiny." - V.S. Naipaul

That last line killed me.

Great Moments In 20th Century Literature

     "Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman's nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time. I was amazed that, obsessed with Yvette as I had been, I had taken so much for granted. The body on the bed was to me like a revelation of woman's form. I wondered that clothes, even the apparently revealing tropical clothes I had seen on Yvette, should have concealed so much, should have broken the body up, as it were, into separate parts and not really hinted at the splendor of the whole.
     "Yvette said, 'This hasn't happened to me for years.'
     "That statement, if it was true, would have been a sufficient reward; my own climax was not important to me. If what she said was true!" - V.S. Naipaul

she's the only person who would send me articles about Ulysses.

we should be married to each other. the fact that we're not is absurd and baffles me daily.

happy birthday.