Sleep With Me - Hanif Kureishi

9
Charles I'm so relaxed these days I'm hardly alive.  Are you in therapy yet?
Julie Everybody talks about themselves enough as it is.
Charles That's because it's the one thing most people know anything about.

22
Julie Ah... You love the children.
Stephen Your anger is unbearable.
Julie You make me like this.  You don't let me in.
Stephen You wouldn't like what you saw.

49
Sophie That's the mistake, though - thinking you can find everything there... Families, if you don't mind me saying so, are mental hospitals.

The Body - Hanif Kureishi

3
Beside my numerous contradictions - I am, I have been told, at least three different people - I am unstable, too, lost in myself, envious, and constantly in need of reassurance.  My wife says that I have craziness, bewildering moods and "internal disappearances" I am not even aware of.  I can go into the shower as one man and emerge as another, worse, one.  My pupils enlarge, I move around obsessively, I yell and stamp my feet.  A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me.  None of this has diminished, despite years of self-analysis, therapy, and "writing as healing," as some of my students used to all the attempt to make art.  Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to.  If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas.  I'd better enjoy them, then.

55
How fidelity interferes with love, at times!  What were refinement and the intellect compared to a sublime fuck?

69
It has, at least, become clear that it is our pleasure, rather than our addictions and vices, that are our greatest problems.  Pleasure can change you in an instant; it can take you anywhere.  If these gratifications were intoxicating and almost mystical in their intensity, I learned, when something stranger happened, that indulgence wasn't a full-time job and reality was a shore where dreams broke.

132
People either want eternal life or they want out right now.

149
I was a stranger on the earth, a nobody with nothing, belonging nowhere, a body alone, condemned to begin again, in the nightmare of eternal life.

Intimacy - Hanif Kureishi

Silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.  Couples have good reason for not speaking.

Their reluctance to go to sleep I don't understand.  For months the highlight of my day has been the anticipation of unconsciousness.

Ambition without imagination is always clumsy.

"But marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell and a reason for living.  You need to be equipped in all areas, not just the sexual."
"Yes," I said, dully. "I know."
Oh to be equipped in all areas.

No wonder everyone wants it - as if they have known such love before and can barely remember it, yet are compelled ever after to seek it as the single thing worth living for.  Without love, most of life remains concealed.  Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty.  If you hold back, nothing interesting happens.  At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people.  Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you.

She is of a disapproving generation of women.  She thinks she's a feminist but she's just bad-tempered.

Suddenly I had the feeling that everything was as it should be and nothing could add to this happiness or contentment.  This was all that there was, and all that could be.  The best of everything had accumulated in this moment.  It could only have been love.