I never change, I simply become more myself.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
The best revenge is living well without you.
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
In love there are two things - bodies and words.
A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Every scar in my face is worth it.
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.
Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless.
I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.
I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.
Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.
Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
I love insult, it's always honest.
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
These are the moments for which we live.
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
I'm Legs Sadovsky I'm FOXFIRE I don't fuck around with guys.
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.
When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.
Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating.
I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell your story.
Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.
The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not. But of course interns are paid, in experience.
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.
Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.
And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.
Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?
To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.
None of the rest of my life figures here.
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
