Being ill like this combines shock – this time I will die – with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.
God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle – or instruction.
My protagonists are my mother’s voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.
Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can’t think of any other place I’d rather die than here.
In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.
It bothers me that I won’t live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.
It is like visiting one’s funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.
I’m sixty-two, and it’s ecological sense to die while you’re still productive, die and clear a space for others, old and young.
Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall.
Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.
Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one’s head.
In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...
It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.
I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it – well, it is dangerous – but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work.
Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been.
Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don’t always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our maneuvers in our emergencies and longings.
I have thousands of opinions still – but that is down from millions – and, as always, I know nothing.
True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.
He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly’s unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.
He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child’s heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away – too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal – would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.
My mother’s eyes were incomprehensible; they were dark stages where dimly seen mob scenes were staged and all one ever sensed was tumult and drama, and no matter how long one waited, the lights never went up and the scene never was explained.