A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book.You cannot hope to console yoursel...
The problem of self-loathing isn't new. What's new is the idea that it's the people with the history of greatest injustice who have the greatest right to be heard, and that the time has come for the a...
A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you'd fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking u...
What exactly did Simone Weil mean when she said, When you have to make a decision in life, about what you should do, do what will cost you the most.Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do wha...
If I bring him home though, I swear he’ll spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. And he deserves better than that, don’t you think?’Yes, I think, my heart breaking.
Another memory. She walks into the kitchen, sits down at the kitchen counter with me, and says, I just got a very interesting phone call. It was some guy who said he was doing a survey for the Maidenf...
I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn't do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we kn...
Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. Rebecca West.
Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do...
It’s not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you’ve come to love was like before you met them. It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child. I have felt this way abo...
Are you a political prisoner, Dooley?Her blue eyes, immense now in her gaunt face, turned a pitying gaze on the reporter who'd asked her this. Yes, she said. And so are you.
Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.
Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he’d gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn’t become a writer. The problem of self-do...
Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Why do I think you did it?Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water.Because you were weak and in pain.Because you were tired of fighting.
Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since - more than two decades now - I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled...
Writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn’t something you have to share with other people.
During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, th...
You caught some flak for questioning whether there could really be such a thing as a flâneuse. You didn’t think it was possible for a woman to wander the streets in the same spirit and manner as a man...
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