Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself. otherwise, you’rejust a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by the chance and the insensible wind.
My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly’s in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently.
Oh, everything is gorgeous once it’s gone.
My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind.
It’s the work that’s important, not the individual who does it.
Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.
Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last.
That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?
It’s been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...
While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.
From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.
To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies.
If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.
Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met.
No wonder Wonderland isn’t funny to read anymore: We live there full time. We need a break from it.
Children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint.
No one is exempt from grief.
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
They’d never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.