Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely – perhaps never – furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.
Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. “Pa?
Nor do I like being told upsetting news – unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you’re safe.
We begin as children imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.
Momma used to say, you got to know when to move. More important than knowing when to stay put.
SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.
Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.
Love you in that cheerleader’s costume. Last Friday. You didn’t see me I guess. But I was there.
Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.
Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.
No one would be able to name what had happened or would wish to name it. Rape was a word that came not be spoken at High Point Farm.
For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.
In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?
Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and “brooding” windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As.
You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.
A familiar story, Marya instructs herself – a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.
The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.
Secrets have always been easy for me, it’s the opposite of secrets that is hard.