There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
Root out all the “to be” verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No “It was” or “they are” or “I am.” Don’t let it be, make it happen.
I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.
Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.
The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.
In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it’s one of the few kinds of writing that doesn’t tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We’re surrounded by advertising.
But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after – oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.
Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job... And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct... Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.
Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, “My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.
Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits.
When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.
Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, “What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?” I think it’s fear. Codi, I hope you won’t be hurt by this, but I don’t think I’ll ever be going back. I don’t think I can.
I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.
There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It’s a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.
So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all my parts.
The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.