He Is Not Jackson Pollock

From novelist's John Haskell's American Purgatorio, the followup to his book of short stories I Am Not Jackson Pollock. I read this a while ago in Belize, a rather splendid place to read a book, and in the midst of coming home and a wildly belated unpacking session, I found this book with numerous underlinings that I'd forgotten about. Without further ado. 

"I tried to explain to her about Anne and what I was doing. I told her it felt as if a door was slowly closing in front of me, and that behind the door there was something I was still connected to...And as I watched her arms open and then dangle there against her hips, I thought, Why couldn't that door also be here? Why did I have go go somewhere? Why couldn't I somehow see in these things here, or be connected through these things, this other thing I was looking for?"

"As I watched her walk I told myself, This is what I have to do, meaning, This is what I feel, meaning, This is who I think I have to be."

"I start to imagine, in my mind, not a perfect person, because I don't need perfection anymore. I'm not a perfect person - far from it - but I want a person to give my love to. As if something inside me needs to leave my body and find an object outside of my body. As I stare at the bougainvillea vine blooming over the door, more than seeing any one specific person, I imagine a generalized person, a woman. I conceive of a love for her. I imagine her imperfections and it's those imperfections that I see myself loving. And she, in my dreams, is willing to return my love. My fantasies, as I run them through my mind, over and over, become not quite reality, but something I can live for."

"During the ride, instead of excitement, I feel nostalgia. For life. This is life. You can't get much more adrenaline in life than this. And although the ride doesn't take much time, at the end of it I'm crying, not over the absence of that life, but over its existence."

"They call it painful beauty because it's only here so long, and then it's over. Even when it's here, even as we experience it, it's over. And because I realize it's over, I'm holding on to that beauty, and even the sense of that beauty, as long as I can."