At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child' (109).
You write a thing down because you’re hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion.
Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?
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.
What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.
They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.
They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing)
Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.
It is widely believed that although animals don't know that one day they'll die, many of them do know when they're actually dying. So at what point does a dying animal become aware of what's happening...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Socrates to Phaedrus: I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything.)
There is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find
There's a certain kind of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?
She indulged his long-winded Tolstoy bashing (he saw Tolstoy, in no way equal to Dostoevsky, as a kind of highbrow Margaret Mitchell who had helped prepare the way for socialist realism)
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something h...
Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo - beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo...