She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.
When you’re younger, it’s all theoretical. It’s all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.
When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?
I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it’s sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.
What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.
Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.
I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.
I like to think the world wasn’t ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn’t ready for the world. I’ve always arrived too late for my life.
She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.
What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that’s what we long for as writers.
So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.
Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.
The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.
Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you.
When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.
Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized. Without them, we’d be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.
At night the sky is pure astronomy.
In one’s youth, one has tremendous access to one’s feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There’s more at stake in life.
Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, and for a little while, you actually feel like you’ve become one with the other person, merged souls and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again.
Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.