That’s how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don’t have ordinarily.
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You’re dead, yet alive. There’s no sensation so exquisite.
Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.
I’m nobody’s daughter now. I’m through with that.
Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Exotic: meaning you’re “desired.” For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
And that’s the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a “good” mother in the world’s eyes or a “bad” mother, how everything in a woman’s life is funneled through her body between her legs.
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She’d become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
She wasn’t in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there’s a place to be located on a map that’s destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn’t too late. If no one stops you.
I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It’s so wonderful, going to bed.
Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
My writing is often a way of ‘bearing witness’ for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won’t be affected too much by my personal life.