I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.
Memory is a dream to begin with.
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine th...
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the d...
آن زندگی را که باعث نوشتن میشود نمیتوان روی کاغذ آورد. آن زندگی بی آنکه خود نویسنده بداند به پیش میرود. فارغ از اشتغالات فکری و هیاهو، در گودالهایی عمیق و تاریک که خاطرات شبحوار بهخاطر ما در آن...
That room—once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you’re there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yea even its length, will reflect the force of y...
Happiness is endless hapiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I h...
Youth. A once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Want! You must want something. What do you want?
Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, Lord have mercy! He did not remember de...
Look the stars are out. Don't you wish you could reach out and pick them like flowers?I hadn't thought of it.Life. That's the way life is to me, Howard. You keep picking things until you get the one t...
When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innoc...
That room - once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you're there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yeah even its length, will reflect the force o...
But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackene...
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
You boys know what tropism is, it's what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it - you just darken the room, leave a c...
I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.