I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one’s generosity? Why regret one’s impulsiveness, one’s misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you’d written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don’t cherish us as we’d cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.
You love the life you’ve lived because it is yours.
That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.
Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.
The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By.
Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it.
I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed: Yes my husband died. Yes I am very sad. Yes you are kind to offer condolences. Now can we change the subject?
Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.
Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them.
Words are like wild birds – they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.
She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.
The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.
That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray – here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.
Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the words suggest.
Sick? – What’s sick? Who is ‘well’? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent ‘well’?
Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.
For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied.