So you don't believe we have souls I guess? and Legs laughed and said, Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even...
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescenc...
These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
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 w...
When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.
Because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn'...
The music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
Silence rolled at me, in waves.
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvase...
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that i...
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.
...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here...