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.