One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.
Want! You must want something. What do you want?
To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.
You boys know what tropism is, it’s what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it – you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can’t dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.
I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is “depressing” because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don’t seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; “witty stories,” in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; “upbeat” stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We’re grown ups now.
Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends.
That room – once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you’re there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yeah even its length, will reflect the force of your character and the wisdom of your judgments. And then you hit an icy path on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke and you no more than a spectator to your own dreamy slide toward the verge, and then you remember where you are.
I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.
I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.
Whatever people gave you from their overflowing hearts they remembered, and expected you to remember, forever.
She’d laugh at odd times as we talked and this flustered me pleasantly and made me laugh too, as if we both understood something we couldn’t say.
It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people.
I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves.
Storytelling is an escape from the jail of the self, leading to the ultimate adventure – seeing life through the eyes of another.
I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best.
I had no right to see them this way.
Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not at all-it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.
And I learned that it’s a bad idea to curse if you’re in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.
The life that produces writing can’t be written about. Is is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.
Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me.