S.j. Watson Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of collection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

I am an adult, but a damaged one.

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

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

With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.

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.

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 were never going to be any happy endings for me. I know that now. But that is all right.

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

This is dying everyday. Over and over.

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

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

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

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

There were never going to be any happy ending for me. I know that now. But that is all right. That is all right.

لقد تسربت سنوات عديدة كالرمال من بين أصابعي ولم تترك أي أثر يدل عليها,لم تعد للدقائق وجود في حياتي ولم أعد أملك الا دقات الساعة لتعلمني أن الوقت يمر ويمضي بلا عودة.

I wonder what I would find if I could go back and decipher the layers, if it were possible to delve into my past that way, but realize that, even if it were possible, it would be futile.

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.

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

…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.

أدركت أن الظلام سيخيم قريبا وان الشمس ستغرب وان القمر سيتوسط كبد السماء وبهذا ينتهي يوم آخر وأخسره للأبد!! :(

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

The little things. Perhaps it is these trivialities I have been writing down in my book, these small hooks on which my whole life is hung.

ان الناس يغيرون الحقائق علي الدوام,ويعيدون كتابة تاريخهم ليسهلوا الأمور علي أنفسهم ويجعلوها أكثر ملائمة لروايات الأحداث المفضلة لديهم.انهم بفعلون هذا بشكل تلقائي ويخترعون الذكريات من دون تفكير.فان أقنع المرء نفسه بحدوث شئ ما بشكل متكرر بما يكفي لأن يصدقه,فسوف يصدقه فعلا,وهذا ما يجعله يتذكره بعد ذلك.

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

Soon I will sleep, and my brain will begin to delete everything. Tomorrow I will go through it all again.

We tell ourselves often enough that something happened, we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

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

أدركت أنه لم يعد لدي أي طموح بعد الآن,وأنني لم أعد أريد من حياتي سوي أن أشعر بانني انسانة طبيعية وأن أعيش ككل انسان أخر يبني تحربة فوق أخري,وأن يمنح كل يوم يومي التالي شكله ولونه.انني أريد أن أنمو ببطء وأن أتعلم الأشياء وأشكل التجارب.

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 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.

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.

I want to sleep. To find a safe place somewhere, and close my eyes, and rest, like an animal. That is what I am. An animal. Living from moment to moment, day to day, trying to make sense of the world in which I find myself.

I couldn't imagine how i would get from here to there. i couldn't imagine living through a whole string of identical days.

Men always say I LOVE YOU as a QUESTION

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

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.

بينما كنت أتأمل باعجاب أدركت أنها ليست حقيقية.فأنا أعرف أنني لا أتذكر ما حدث فعلا,بل أتذكر الصورة التي رسمتها في ذهني وأنا أقرأ عما حدث,ولهذا,فهذه مجرد ذكري لذكري سابقة.انها ذكريات للذكريات.ان معظم الناس يعودون بذاكرتهم الي سنوات عديدة وعقود مديدة,ولكن الأمر بالنسبة الي لا يتعدي بضع ساعات.

How tempting it must be for him to keep quiet, and how difficult life must be for him, knowing that I carry these jagged shards of memory with me always, everywhere, like tiny bombs, and at any moment one might pierce the surface and force me to go through the pain as if for the first time, taking him with me.

To create myself from nothing.

الآن أدرك أنني أحبه,ولطالما أحببته.وان توجب علي أن أتعلم حبه كل يوم,اذا,فليكن ذلك,فهذا هو ما سأفعله.

No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

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

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

Ich fühlte mich auf einmal wie betäubt. Alles wich zurück, bis in mir nur noch Schmerz übrigblieb und sonst nichts. Schmerz. Auf einen einzigen Punkt konzentriert.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

La dejé en el suelo, delante de mí. Y empecé a dudar. No sabía qué quería hacer, si abrirla o no. ¿Qué nuevas sorpresas podría esconder? Puede que, como la memoria misma, contuviera verdades que no podía ni empezar a imaginar. Sueños reales, horrores inesperados. Me invadió el miedo. Pero estas verdades, me dije, son todo lo que tengo. Son mi pasado. Son lo que me hace humana. Sin ellas no soy nada. Solo un animal.

I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

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.

Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve", she said, "because one day you'll be fine and the next..." I knew what she meant: Boom! My ambitions would disappear and all I would want to do would be to have children. "It's what happened to me," she said. "It'll happen to you. It happens to everyone.

It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.

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.

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?

How will I feel when I look in a mirror and see the reflection of my grandmother?

كل ما استطعت فعله أنني أخذت أراقب بعجز بينما راحت تلك الذكريات تمر أمام عيني مسرعة ثم تختفي بسرعة كما ظهرت.

الحقيقة هي كل ما تبقي لي فهي الماضي الذي يجعلني انسانة حقيقية.انني من دونها لا شئ ولست أكثر من مجرد حيوان بلا ماض ولا تاريخ ولا ذاكرة.

Why did he feel that wanting to make sense of my fractured life meant that I wanted to change it in some way?

His grief is not new. It has had the time to bed down within him, to become part of his foundations, rather than something that rocks them.

There were never going to be any happy endings for me. I know that now. But that is all right.

Was sind wir denn, wenn nicht eine Ansammlung von Erinnerungen?

Ich rutsche. Tiefer und tiefer. In die Dunkelheit. Ich darf nicht schlafen. Ich darf nicht schlafen. Ich. Darf. Nicht. Schlafen.

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

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

ان حزنه لم يبد لي جديدا.وحان الوقت حتي تخمد أحزانه وتستقر في أعماقه وتصبح جزءا من الأساس الذس يبني عليه كل حياته,لا أن تصبح سببا في تحطيمها. ان جرحي وحده هو ما ينزف ويتجدد كل يوم من أيام حياتي.

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.

En la agenda escribí que era como estar muerta, pero ¿esto? Esto es peor. Tengo la sensación de morir cada día. Necesito sentir que estoy progresando. No puedo imaginarme continuando así mucho más tiempo. Sé que esta noche me dormiré y mañana me despertaré de nuevo sin saber nada, y pasado mañana, y al otro, todos los días de mi vida. No me lo puedo imaginar. No puedo afrontarlo. Esto no es vida, es solo una existencia, saltar de un momento al siguiente ignorando el pasado y sin planes para el futuro. Lo peor de todo es que ni siquiera sé qué no sé. Puede que haya muchas cosas esperando a hacerme daño. Cosas que ni siquiera soy capaz de imaginar.

Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do, on some level? Show our best face to the world, leave the darkness within? The screen of the internet just makes it easier

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

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

I did not want to let him, but at the same time knew that somehow I ought to, that I had left it too late, watched my chances to say something, to stop this, disappear one by one. And now I had no choice. I had wanted it then, as he unzipped his trousers and stepped clumsily out of his underwear, and so I must still want it now, now that I am beneath his body.

Lorsque j'ai regardé à travers le viseur, j'ai eu l'impression que c'était de cette manière que j'aimais voir le monde. Dans un cadre.

says.

She said that you and Ben were separated. Ben left you. A year or so after you moved to Waring House.” “Separated?” I said. It felt as if the room was receding, becoming vanishingly small. Disappearing.

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

Kiss me, Ben," I said. "Properly.

Instead, 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. I

I could see it all. The hand on the shoulder, then the hug. The mouths that find each other through the tears, the moment when guilt and the certainty that things must go no further gives way to lust and the certainty that they cannot stop.

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.

Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve, because one day you'll be fine and the next ...

I realize with sudden clarity that we're wearing masks, all of us, all 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 was born tomorrow today I live yesterday killed me. —PARVIZ OWSIA

Before I Go to Sleep S. J. Watson

Good idea,” he said. “But you’ll have to write in it tonight. Before you go to sleep. Otherwise tomorrow it’ll be just another blank notebook. You won’t know what it is.

The wind whipped the tail of the little boy’s kite; a sound like a death rattle.

an hour. And now my mind oscillates.