We don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be human.
When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. Maybe.
Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.
To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived – to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that – this doubtless is the right way to live. – HENRY JAMES.
There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.
There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.
Surely an American doesn’t want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.
Sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them.
In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.
This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.
It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.
Life is short. Remember that, too.
I think every fear you ever have, every one – thunder or spiders or roller coasters – they’re all fear of dying. Every last one.
Perhaps instead of scaring ourselves we need to surprise ourselves every day. We are, after all, always a work in progress.
It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented.
Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.
But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all.
If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.
I hid my wounds because I was ashamed... but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced...