I will be the clinician of my own pathology.
Loving Felix she’d acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she’d acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, “truth” was common property.
How alone this was going to be.
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don’t know it at the time.
There is something female about being dead.
But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention.
How exhausted I am suddenly! – though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling – almost – exhilarated.
A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn’t time for it all and if he couldn’t do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.
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.
It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.
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.