Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind,′ her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. ‘When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft – a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.
I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future.
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
For we did makeup. But we didn’t forgive each other. And we didn’t take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.
It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
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.