Цитаты из книги Cat's Eye

I don’t yet know that a man can be admirable in many ways but a jerk in others. Also I haven’t yet learned that chivalry in men is idiocy in women: men can get out of a rescue a lot more easily, once they get into it.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings, then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines. What will be left of them when I’m seventy? None of the baroque ecstasy, none of the grotesque compulsion. A word or two, hovering in the inner emptiness. Maybe a toe here, a nostril there, or a mustache, floating like a little curl of seaweed among the other flotsam.

Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf life.

Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that’s all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual.

Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

My brother asks if there are any poisonous snakes in India, and Mr. Banerji, now much more at ease, begins to enumerate them. My mother smiles, because this is going better than she thought it would. Poisonous snakes are fine with her, even at the dinner table, as long as they make people happy.

I know he’s miserable, underneath his smiles and politeness. I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

I will buy oranges, yogurt without the jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I’ll feed myself enzymes, and friendly bacteria.

If I cut off my ear, would the market value go up? Better still, stick my head in the oven, blow out my brains. What rich art collectors like to buy, among other things, is a little vicarious craziness.

I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

“Okay,” he said. “You know what you’re doing.” He gave me a hug.

I wish it were true.

Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out.

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.

Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off.

The sun sets in a long, chilly, lingering sunset, flamingo pink, then salmon, then the improbable vibrant red of Mercurochrome.

I also have two daughters, by now grown up. Their names are Sarah and Anne, good sensible names. One of them is almost a doctor, the other an accountant. These are sensible choices. I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own.

I live in a house, with window curtains and a lawn, in British Columbia, which is as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning.

Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn’t seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.