My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books “negatively” except in those instances in which the “negative” is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.
Life is the horror, abortion or miscarriage is the redemption. As Sophocles said so beautifully, ‘Never to have been born is best, but once you’ve entered this world, return as quickly as possible to the place you came from.
These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.
Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn’t seen in years turning up looking all wrong.
Love is what can’t be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes. Love is what happens when you’ve been looking another way. Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself it’s nothing, a strand of hair, at last you touch it and discover it’s an insect – you cast off with a curse.
While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.
Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York.
What’ve I got to do, to prove how much I love you? Blow us all away?
Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;.
You have hardened your heart against your “American cousin.” It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suffering makes saints of us, which is a joke. Still I realize you have no time for me in your life now. There is no “purpose” to me. Even.
You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn’t exist.
THANK YOU but please do not write again. And do not call. I have had enough of you.
There’s a sort of melancholy romance to the experience of being lonesome. I think of reading as a kind of romantic alone activity that you’re doing. The image would include being curled up somewhere on a rainy day and you’re reading very intensely involved in a world that no one can see because it’s inside your head.
All prices of all things – at least, useless beautiful things like rare books – are inherently absurd, rooted in the human imagination and in the all-too-human predilection to desperately want what others value highly, and to scorn what others fail to value.
Living’s immediacy, you go full sail, you’re in a fever of motion. Until it’s safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, “Yes I was happy then, yes now it’s all over I can see I was happy then.” Maybe that’s the advantage of dying?
They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.
What is destiny – a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.
I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.
He said no break is permanent. Like a bone that heals crooked, still it will heal.
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.