The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it’s going well as when it’s going badly.
Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.
The constant happiness is curiosity.
I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you’ve been driving for a long time – you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.
Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness – however temporary, however flimsy – of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
She would live now, not read.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.