The despairing soul is a rebel.
The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.
Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
The regional voice is the universal voice.
How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called “sentences.” And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, “Why are you trying to starve yourself?” To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.
In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved.
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
It’s very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation – but, then I couldn’t be myself either.
The quiet people just do their work.
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.
We are the species that clamors to be lied to.
As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.