Luke Davies

“Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.”

“Comfort is beauty muted by heroin. Sadness is beauty drained by lack of it.”

“When you think you are in love, you don't want to know about the things that could end it.”

“It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.”

“His eyes are huge and black. I think about desire. There are flickerings that occur, and we know very little about them. Millimetres of dilation are words in a language.”

“You're beautiful, but you're somewhere else. That's okay. I can handle that. But we won't continue as friends, not just now. I like you as a lover, not a friend.”

“All summer it feels as if it will rain soon. All summer the strange feeling, 'something will break.”

“I understand only that a vast void, an emptiness, is needing to be filled. O the things we grasp at.”

“In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity.”

“Very quickly I begin to understand the selfishness of my love, the inappropriateness of my relationships, when I realise that every time I fuck it feels as if I am wrestling with demons.”

“Not only good to be alive, but nice to come with a stranger. Intimacy? For now I want nothing of it. I am simply trying to emerge from the violent unnecessariness of death.”

“Always, everywhere, the world is filled with collisions.”

“That's all that faith is, the knowledge that the greater thing is with you. That's all the faith you need. The knowledge that you are not the greater thing.”

“Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.”

“I learnt too late that what is most important to us is always most precious at the moment it occurs, and it is precious in its absolute immediacy and not as some vague confirmation of future directions; since the only certain fact, aside from death, is the flimsiness of everything.”

“Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.”

“What is love, in the beginning, if not this mapping out, this settling into the other's undulations?”

“It is so exquisitely funny and sad, the way we view each other; how very little, despite our best efforts, we communicate.”

“In the presence of their love I sensed my lonliness, and I understood for a moment, clearly, that deep and basic human desire for companionship at depth.”

“Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.”

“We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.”

“If time stood still, and we could choose thetime, the best time,then love withoutpain would be all I know.”

“I would feel deeply the elegant satisfaction of being caressed by that gawky boy, and I would take his face in both my hands and kiss him hard, as if I could draw from those lips the very strength and sweetness he did not know he had.”

“It was all about eyes, the truth.”

“If I could find someone to blame, perhaps I could get angry. Anything would be better than this sadness, this sense of regret for events that were never mine.”

“For every gain there is a sacrifice, and the removal of the parasite sometimes entails removal of the host.”

“The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment.”

“Was it possible to feel love with an empty mind? For if the mind was empty, then it was empty of love too.”

“Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.”

“She told herself that life is short. This didn't mean that nothing mattered, only that when strange things happened there was often no turning back.”

“It's just that you reach a point where metaphors become indistinguishable from the things they represent. And the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. And it feels like being born”

“What everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the streeet, is the one obvious point: 'future corpse, future corpse.”

“What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth.”

“When you talk about love, and family, invariably too you are talking about compassion. This would include the notion that we are all just lumped together, and tolerance is a virtue.”

“The very concept of solid ground is a myth. The galaxy itself is adrift.”

“Drought brings out the worst in us and it's easy to hate your fellow human beings.”

“I'm hurling all the little joys against the greater sadness. The sadness is a giant weight. It presses down. Its mean: "What's the point?”

“I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen”

“And I come to realise that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows.”

“When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't...”

“Once upon a time, there was Candy and Dan. Things were very hot that year. All the wax was melting in the trees. He would climb balconies, climb everywhere, do anything for her, oh Danny boy. Thousands of birds, the tiniest birds, adorned her hair. Everything was gold. One night the bed caught fire. He was handsome and a very good criminal. We lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. It was the afternoon of extravagant delight. Danny the daredevil. Candy went missing. The days last rays of sunshine cruise like sharks. I want to try it your way this time. You came into my life really fast and I liked it. We squelched in the mud of our joy. I was wet-thighed with surrender. Then there was a gap in things and the whole earth tilted. This is the business. This, is what we're after. With you inside me comes the hatch of death. And perhaps I'll simply never sleep again. The monster in the pool. We are a proper family now with cats and chickens and runner beans. Everywhere I looked. And sometimes I hate you. Friday -- I didn't mean that, mother of the blueness. Angel of the storm. Remember me in my opaqueness. You pointed at the sky, that one called Sirius or dog star, but on here on earth. Fly away sun. Ha ha fucking ha you are so funny Dan. A vase of flowers by the bed. My bare blue knees at dawn. These ruffled sheets and you are gone and I am going to. I broke your head on the back of the bed but the baby he died in the morning. I gave him a name. His name was Thomas. Poor little god. His heart pounds like a voodoo drum.”