The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica...
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
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?
...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...
This web of intricate connections
Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.
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...
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.
You love the life you've lived because it is yours.
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
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...
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
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 isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
That I—I have not ‘heard’ . . . What is it?
Scintillant,
Papà ci amava. Ci ama.
