When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.
I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.
The woman is the home. That’s where she used to be, and that’s where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home – will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.
I know all one can know when one knows nothing.
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It’s a slur on the divine in our nature.
I don’t have general views about anything, except social injustice.
In heterosexual love there’s no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it’s the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.
We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we’re in the vanguard of waiting.
Drinking isn’t necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can’t drink without thinking you’re killing yourself.
Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.
She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.
The thing that’s between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you’re a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we’re alike.
Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can’t explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can’t understand it at all any longer.
Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.
It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
It’s afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn’t necessarily prove that you loved him.
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
Life is only lived full-time by women with children.