What do any of us really know about love?
There is no answer. It’s okay. But even if it wasn’t okay, what am I supposed to do?
I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.
But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else – the cold and where he’d go in it – was outside, for a while anyway.
There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
What good are insights? They only make things worse.
There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.
Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you’re a drunk.
We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been.
And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us – excuse me for saying this – but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.
When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.
The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.
It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.
Suppose I say summer, write the word “hummingbird”, put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.
We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We’d reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.