As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn’t exist.
THANK YOU but please do not write again. And do not call. I have had enough of you.
There’s a sort of melancholy romance to the experience of being lonesome. I think of reading as a kind of romantic alone activity that you’re doing. The image would include being curled up somewhere on a rainy day and you’re reading very intensely involved in a world that no one can see because it’s inside your head.
All prices of all things – at least, useless beautiful things like rare books – are inherently absurd, rooted in the human imagination and in the all-too-human predilection to desperately want what others value highly, and to scorn what others fail to value.
Living’s immediacy, you go full sail, you’re in a fever of motion. Until it’s safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, “Yes I was happy then, yes now it’s all over I can see I was happy then.” Maybe that’s the advantage of dying?
They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.
What is destiny – a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.
I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.
He said no break is permanent. Like a bone that heals crooked, still it will heal.
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals.
And so it became a household of silence as if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.
A bully is one who forces you to laugh at his jokes, even if they are not jokes. That is how you know he is a bully. A.
He has made a show of being a devoted family man but his life has been carefully arranged so that he spends as little time with his family as possible.
I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility.
She understood that a woman’s work inside the home is not work but sacred privilege and duty.
Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don’t know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn’t turn out to be true.
Marx had famously denounced religion as the opiate of the people, now it was Fame that was the opiate of the people;.
He understood the primitive, malevolent spell of The Falls: he was beginning to feel again the sinister attraction he’d felt years ago, as an adolescent, when his emotions were rawer, closer to the surface. Those feelings of dissolution, loss, panic, very like the sensation of falling in love against one’s will. The Falls! You can’t believe it can kill you. When it is pure spirit. After.
The power of a parent to wound, to kill. The power of a parent is terrible.