And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, ‘Now what?’ And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn’t love.
Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.
As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.
The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.
What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I’d outgrown the novel I’d once been so happy to live in.
He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.
My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.
When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it’s absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.
The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...
Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.
A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.
When a smoker says he wants to quit but can’t, what he’s really saying is, “I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal.” To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility.
Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.
I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.