I have always said that the way to deal with the pain of other’s is by sympathy, which is suffering with, and that the way to deal with one’s own pain is to put one foot after the other. Yet I was nev...
I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgo...
Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.
But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, de...
Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.
Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in babushkas they might be out of the peasant chorus of...
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices f...
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't...
Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
A poet is somebody who has written a poem.
Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.
Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?
Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.
There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.
There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is...