Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency o...
She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.
P.J. said, That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know.Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it.Yeah. But some statements are...
Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for man...
On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see...
Oh, it’s a terrible, cruel thing—first you’re young, and that takes up such a long time you think it’s forever, then suddenly you’re not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there’s just...
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Like many shy people, once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand to change the subject, and he had no idea how to engage another person. Like a runaw...
Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the...
It simply fell from him, like a heavy overcoat he'd shrugged off, no longer needing its warmth or bulk to protect him.
If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine’s age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim...
Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and...
I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it...
It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.