Enigma Variation Quotes

So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.

I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.

And then it hits me: I've lost you. You now rank among the things I'll always regret: opportunities lost, children never had, things I might have accomplished or done far better, lovers who have come and gone.

Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you.

We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

You're alone, as I'm alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won't solve a thing.

You know nothing about me. You see me. But you don't see me. Everyone else sees me. And yet no one has the foggiest notion of the gathering storm within me. It's my secret private little hell. I live with it, I sleep with it. I love that no one knows. I wish you knew. Sometimes I fear you do.

We loved with every organ but the heart.

. . . love, which happens only once in life, and thereafter is never quite spontaneous or impulsive.

And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere.

You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I've lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what's tearing me up.

I live for this. And if this is all there is, well, this is all there is.

We make assumptions about how our lives are being charted without knowing that we’re even making these assumptions—which is the beauty of assumptions: they anchor us without the slightest clue that what we’re doing is trusting that nothing changes. We believe that the street we live on will remain the same and bear its name forever. We believe that our friends will stay our friends, and that those we love we’ll love forever. We trust and, by dint of trusting, forget we trusted.

There is no love without desire, diffidence, defeat.

What was sad was knowing she was most likely the last reminder that there might never be another go. We might still communicate, might still meet for coffee, but the dream was gone, the hand across the table was gone, the square itself was gone.

Yes, the past is a foreign country", I said, "but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return.

Your problem is not that you misread signs; all you see are signs.

Yes, the past is a foreign country," I said, "but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return." "There's a life that takes place in ordinary time," I said, "and another that bursts in but just as suddenly fizzles out. And then there's the life we may never reach but that could so easily be ours if only we knew how to find it. It doesn't necessarily happen on our planet, but is just as real as the one we live by—call it our 'star life.' Nietzsche wrote that estranged friends may become declared enemies but in some mysterious way continue to remain friends, though on a totally different sphere. He called these 'star friendships.

Tonight the rain feels so meek and muted that brushing it away with a hand might make it stop. It lacks conviction, has lost its vigor. Don't bother with umbrellas, it seems to say. I'm about to stop anyway, my heart's not in it tonight.

As long as we can be one with something, anything, we're okay.

And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I'd ever known in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I've been doing all these years living.

This doesn’t end, whatever happens. Never, never ends.” I tightened my arms around her. “Star love, my love, star love. It may not live but it never dies. It’s the only thing I’m taking with me, and you will too, when the time comes.

If only I could dream of you. Sometimes I do. But not often enough. Dreams are like practice runs and mini-rehearsals; they tell us what we'll do, when to ask, how we'll touch when the time comes, if the time comes.

I myself was nothing more than a collection of marginal selves who sit out their time like unpaid stevedores on an unfinished pier where no boats ever dock.

This was all in the head. And that's where it stays.

Or were we like people who have died before their time and are given a second chance by some minor deity, but with so many provisos that the new life feels like a deferred death?

I wanted to scream. When I'm with you, I feel I can take what others call my life and turns its face away from the wall. My entire life faces the wall except when I'm with you. I stare at my life and want to undo every mistake, every deceit, turn a new leaf, turn the table, turn the clock. I want to put a real face on my life, not the drab front I've been wearing since forever. So why can't I speak to you now?

The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

Our star life, yours with mine. As someone said over dinner once, each of us is given at least nine versions of our lives, some we guzzle, others we take tiny, timid sips from, and some our lips never touch.

I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking that one day I won't be here to see it and I know I'll miss it, even if I won't have a heartbeat to miss anything. I miss it now for the-days-when, the way I miss places I've never traveled to or things I've never done." "What things have you never done?" "You're young and you're very handsome—how could you possibly understand?" He removed his arm. He lived in a future that wouldn't be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn't been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward. I felt for him.

I was his friend. There was nothing more to want.

The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.

Let the snake that bit you bite me back. Let it bite me on the lip. Die with me.

In the words of the poet, my heart was in the east with you, but my body was out west.

But the whole thing didn't go anywhere—though it never went away either. It just sat there, no past, no future, like a glass of wine filled to the rim but never drunk from.

Stop it. Learn to take things at face value. You're always looking for what's not there.

Ours, I began to fear, was a script without parts.

Occasionally you'll say "Excuse me" when I happen to stand in your way, and "Thank you" when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I'll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts -just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what's called a broken heart.

This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.

But no one can prepare for the worst. The worst doesn't only dash hopes; it tears through everything in ways that are almost meant to hurt, to punish, to shame. Despite my most sobering forecasts, life can still play the cruelest card and scuttle everything—and just when I thought we were sailing past the shoals.

Sero te amavi! Late have I loved you!

I'm like someone who never got off a train that traveled past the last stop.

How can we ever bring ourselves to make love again, I thought, if we can speak of our love only by oblique reference to death?

Snow. As ever the silent snow. It hems you in, lifts your spirit, and as you soar awhile it lets you down for being the meaningless ashen powder that it is.

E soprattutto la pedita di persone che non sapevo nemmeno di dover ancora incontrare e amare ma di cui poi avevo perso le tracce e che non avevo rivisto mai più.

You stop belonging to yourself,” she said. “I belong to my child, my husband, my home, my work, my babysitter, my cleaning lady. The time that remains, like after-tax dollars, doesn’t last longer than a two-minute sonata by Scarlatti.” “And you don’t even like Scarlatti,” I said.

If I had a tumor, then I'd be dead before the year was out, and if I were dead, then there'd be nothing left, no second chances, no leap-year parties, and this waiting for the right time would have been for nothing. I will have died having lived the wrong life. No, not lived: waited.

Why have we waited so long?" I didn't know the answer. "Maybe because what we want hasn't been invented yet." "Maybe because it doesn't exist." "Which is why I dread how this ends." "Good night," she said, turning her back to me, while I wrapped my arms around her. "I know one thing, though," she said without turning around. "What?" "This doesn't end, whatever happens. Never, never ends." I tightened my arms around her. "Star love, my love, star love. It may not live but it never dies. It's the only thing I'm taking with me, and you will too, when the time comes.

She reminds me of infatuated women in 1940s movies who travel by ship and lounge alone on deck and cannot read and all they want is to stroll about at night until the man they love shows up again and offers to light their cigarette.

Now, how far away did Abingdon Square feel, as though it and she and the restaurant, and Maria Malibran, and the sudden false rainfall by the flickering lights of the Miramar hotel sign belonged to another life, a life unlived, a life I knew had turned its back to me and was being nailed to the wall.

And then, as if something were being torn out of my lungs and needed to be said, I finally found a moment when he was alone to tell him. “I’ve never had friends, you’ve been my only friend,” I said, speaking these words without even realizing I had said them. What I’d meant to say was, I was your friend, I wish you’d stayed mine.

You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I've lived and loved by your light alone.

We crossed the bridge and didn't even see the water underneath.

I think everyone is wounded in their sex,” I said. “I can’t think of one person who isn’t.

You and I don’t love the way others do – we run on empty.

We lead many lives, nurse more identities than we care to admit, are given all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.

Sips and maybes is not how one gorges on the wine of life.

He had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen, and I wasn’t brave enough to look at it.

Vivemos muitas vidas, alimentamos mais identidades do que gostamos de admitir, recebemos todo tipo de nome, quando na verdade basta uma, e apenas uma.

I had no idea why I'd written these words. But it was the first time I had taken something in my chest about you and put it in words out into the real world.

Until now, talk has never gone anywhere. All I do is steal wisps of information in the hope of cobbling together your portrait, the way sketch artists do at police stations.

Yours, I realize, is the first real card on the table. I admire this. Mine had been just a joker.

You remembered," she said, surprised that this thing called time had happened to us after all.

I think of the poor man selling hot dogs all day, already planning what he'll need to pack up, what to give away, what to remember, what to let go of, things, places, people, a lifetime.

Go away is what one said to the devil, when the devil is already in us, and what he meant with that look in his eyes as he watched me walk away was, If you don’t leave now, I won’t fight you.

We’re torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

Neither of us was quite sure what the other meant, but, as in dreams, our words could be taken in so many ways, which was fine too, because we liked thinking they had more than one meaning, one obvious, one not so obvious, one hinted at but so muddled that neither of us knew which to grasp, because each was so laced into the others that all three ultimately meant one and the same thing.

But that reasoning perhaps was as much a mask as the others. In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I'd grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.

I even drew pleasure in thinking that my passion was inherited, that it was passed on, and therefore fated. Fate always leaves a mark, and those of us who are truly lucky know the signs and how to read them. He would have taught me everything, and most likely given me everything. Instead, years after, I sought out the wrong people, learned from the wrong teachers, took from those who had less to give and almost nothing I wanted.

And as I opened the door, I pivoted and performed what I hoped was one of those accomplished inspectors' by the way exit lines seen in so many movies: Did she happen to know how one could reach Giovanni, the cabinetmaker?

Você não sabe nada sobre mim. Você me vê. Mas não me enxerga. Todos me veem. Mas ninguém tem a menor ideia da tempestade que se forma dentro de mim. É meu pequeno inferno secreto e privado. Vivo com ele, durmo com ele. Adoro que ninguém saiba.

When I saw you after my dream, it was impossible to go through with anything I'd resolved. You were chilly again, as though you'd intercepted my dream and were so horrified that you thought it best to put distance between us. I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don't fly out and rat on one another's dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves. Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren't willing to hide while dreaming. I wished you'd taken a second look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn't you?

This is the cruel thing about the dead. They come back in ways that always catch us off guard, don’t they, Signor Giovanni?” Mother said. “Yes,” he agreed. “Sometimes, just wanting to tell them something that would have mattered to them, or to ask about people and places only they would have known about, reminds us that they’ll never hear us, won’t answer, don’t care. But perhaps it’s much worse for them: maybe they are the ones calling out to us and it is we who can’t listen and don’t seem to care.

Mas ninguém pode se preparar para o pior. O pior não apenas destrói esperanças; ele destrói tudo quase como se quisesse machucar, punir, envergonhar. Apesar de minhas previsões mais desanimadoras, a vida ainda pode fazer a jogada mais cruel e afundar tudo

Mas ninguém pode se preparar para o pior. O pior não apenas destrói esperanças; ele destrói tudo quase como se quisesse machucar, punir, envergonhar. Apesar de minhas previsões mais desanimadoras, a vida ainda pode fazer a jogada mais cruel e afundar tudo.

In the crowded room with the view of the Hudson, the realization that ours was a stillborn love began to cramp something in me. It wasn't going to kill me, but I wanted to find a corner somewhere in this large apartment where I could be alone and hate myself.

I should find someone to speak to, but—and the thought jolts me because I wasn't careful to nip it—the only one who'd understand is the very one I wish to lash out against. I'm like those seeking comfort or, better yet, advice, from the very person who abuses them.

Il rimpianto è lo strumento che abbiamo per sperare di tornare alla nostra vita reale dopo aver trovato la volontà - la forza cieca e il coraggio - di barattare la vita che ci è stata data con la vita che porta il nostro nome e quello soltanto. Il rimpianto è lo strumento che abbiamo per desiderare cose perdute da tempo ma in realtà mai possedute. Il rimpianto è speranza senza convinzione, dissi. Siamo combattuti fra il rimpianto, che è il prezzo da pagare per le cose non fatte, e il rimorso, che è il prezzo pagato per averle fatte.

Minha vida toda é uma tela. Eu sou uma tela. Meu eu verdadeiro não tem rosto, nem voz, não está sempre comigo. Como o trovão depois do relâmpago, meu eu verdadeiro poderia estar a muitos e muitos quilômetros de distância. Às vezes, não há trovão. Só relâmpago e silêncio.

I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don't fly out and rat on one another's dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves

Sometimes, just wanting to tell them (deceased) something that would have mattered to them, or to ask about people and places only they would have known about, reminds us that they'll never hear us, won't answer, don't care. But perhaps it's much worse for them (deceased): maybe they are the ones calling out to us and it is we who can't listen and don't seem to care.

O passado pode ser ou não um país estrangeiro. Pode se transformar ou permanecer o mesmo, mas sua capital sempre vai ser o Arrependimento, e o que flui ao longo dela é um canal de desejos não concretizados que correm em direção a um arquipélago de pequenas possibilidades que nunca aconteceram de verdade, mas não são irreais por não terem acontecido e talvez ainda possam acontecer embora tenhamos medo de que nunca aconteçam.

I had meant to take her to my favorite pastry shop after dinner. I'd known happiness there once, or maybe not happiness, but the vision of it. I wanted to see whether the place had changed at all, or whether I had changed, or whether, just by sitting with her I could make up for old loves I'd gotten so close to but had never been bold enough to seize. Always got so very close, and always turned my back when the time came. Manfred and I had dessert here so many times, especially after the movies, and before Manfred, Maud and I, because it was so hot on summer nights that we'd stop to drink fizzy lemonades here, night after night, happy to be together drinking nothing stronger. And Chloe, of course, on those cold afternoons on Rivington Street so many years ago. My life, my real life, had not even happened yet, and all of this was rehearsal still. Tonight, I thought, relishing Joyce's words and feeling exquisitely sorry for myself, the time has come for me to set out on my journey westward. Then I thought of Saint Augustine's words: "Sero te amavi! Late have I loved you!

He might, at last, be allowed to speak to Mary unguarded and learn a little more about her. He did not know why she had lodged herself so firmly in his mind but that she was so unlike the young ladies he usually met. So unlike her sisters! This was perhaps a part of it. He had sensed something in Mary that he knew all too well in himself: the pain of being overlooked by one’s immediate family. It was plain that Mary’s father preferred clever, outgoing Elizabeth and Kitty was her mother’s favourite. Mary was...Mary. She is an enigma, Richard thought, letting the noise of his cousins’ conversation drop to a low lull at the back of his mind. And I am intrigued by her.

The military band did not make things easier. Having detected a larger than usual turnout of British travelers, and waiting with some infernal clairvoyance until Cyprian thought he had a grip on himself, just as he turned to bid Yashmeen a breezy arrivederci, they began to play an arrangement for brass of ‘Nimrod’ – what else? – from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Teutonic bluntness notwithstanding, at the first major-seventh chord, an uncertainty of pitch among the trumpets contributing its touch of unsought innocence, Cyprian felt the tap opening decisively. It was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered her lips. He was concentrating on not getting her vestee wet. The music took them for an instant in its autumnal envelope, shutting out the tourist chatter, the steam horns and quayside traffic, in as honest an expression of friendship and farewell as the Victorian heart had ever managed to come up with, until finally, the band moved mercifully on to ‘La Gazza Ladra.’ It wasn’t till Yashmeen nodded and released him that Cyprian realized they had been holding each other.