I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
I knew I would be famous one day. That’s because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
Now i no longer believe that people’s secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person.
Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?
There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.
What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.
I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.