Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss – bittersweet and strange – stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.
She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.
Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.
You are – all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one’s put into it.
No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.
Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they’re learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
Children have very sharp powers of observation – probably sharper than adults – yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.
I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.
Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn’t quite sure what – apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.
There’s a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We’re not big on thought.
The Little Friend is a long book. It’s also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
I really do work in solitude.