Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steel...
But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?
But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after...
When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified—no, frightened—by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in...
They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.
The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather—a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.
Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.
Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places
Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both
She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to...
Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.
His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw ever...
But I hope you will -- use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being -- distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden,...
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
It’s just life. You can’t beat life.