I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn’t believe it anymore.
She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word ‘escape’ used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.
You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said – that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question.
It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.
These relatives of hers, the Boles and the Jetters and the Pooles, used to be around the house a lot, or else Lea wanted to be at one of their houses. It was a clan that didn’t always enjoy one another’s company but who made sure they got plenty of it.
Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.
Children Katy’s age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.
The deceits which her spinster’s sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children’s hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.
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.