20 quotes found
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
“Beauty is a whore, I like money better.”
“I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
“Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?”
“There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.”
“Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”
“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if shed returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) ...”
“What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.”
“We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant ho...”
“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are sl...”
“Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.”
“He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.''You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to t...”
“You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.”
“She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.”
“There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child ...”
“Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.”
“She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.”
“There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.”
“She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage...”
“This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.”
