But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.
Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.
Helen is one of those people who never say anything, not because she’s shy but because she’s learned – in a way I always mean to – that if you don’t say anything, you make people far more nervous and self-conscious and careful around you than if you do. People like me, we just rush into the vacuum of silence people like Helen float around in; we blather and dither and yakyakyak, and people like Helen just sit there and smile into the wind.
I remember thinking that no one had ever told me how much I would love my child; now, of course, I realized something else no one tells you: that a child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was.
One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.
I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.
Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave?
I live in my neighborhood. My neighborhood consists of the dry cleaner, the subway stop, the pharmacist, the supermarket, the cash machine, the deli, the beauty salon, the nail place, the newsstand, and the place where I go for lunch. All this is within two blocks of my house. Which is another thing I love about life in New York: Everything is right there. If you forgot to buy parsley, it takes only a couple of minutes to run out and get it. This is good, because I often forget to buy parsley.
You know, everything adds up. It’s what I keep saying in my books and in Cosmo. If you do every little thing you can do in your own modest position, one thing leads to another. So do it and be it and write the letters and make the phone calls and get on with it.
A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.
What is the answer?” Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas as Stein was dying. There was no reply. “In that case, what is the question?” Stein asked.
How much worse can it get than finishing dinner, having him reach over, pull a hair out of my head, and start flossing with it at the table?
Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that’s for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong.
What did she look like?” “Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare.
Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all.
Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?” So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.
Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.
I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn’t know how to do it.
I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you.
According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that’s that... The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.