Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.
Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar - where you are now, where you've always been.
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".
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