You are your best thing.
Lonely, ain’t it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
A son ain’t what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in bewteen.
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
If you take racism away from certain people – I mean vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist – if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible – misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.
Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it’s much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
I think one of the reasons I’m so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of “chosen-ness” and can easily blossom into bigotry. It’s not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don’t read them later.
What’s interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.
Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.