Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature.
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven.
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
I’m somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don’t like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
One of the cool, chaste countries – Canada or Sweden.
It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod – Small letters sent To her from God.
At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?