I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you’re with them.
It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get
The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.
Ah, God, it’s barbaric, however you look at it,’ he told Ruth.’What, cremation?’ she asked.’Death.
It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.
It wasn’t what you said”, he told her.”It was how I felt when you said it”.
You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.
For once, the tears wouldn’t come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.
Past is past… no it’s not! People are always fond of saying that, but what’s past is never past; not entirely.
There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words – for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.
He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he’d heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart.
The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them
Ghosts… they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air – something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion.
But if you never did anything you couldn’t undo you’d end up doing nothing at all.
The trouble with dying…is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.
Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.
The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
Face it,’ I said. ‘There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got,’ I said.
People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.
Why wasn’t there an etiquette book for runaway wives?
It seems to me that since I’ve had children I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while but when I did write I had more of a self to speak from.
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine – what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.
For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul – chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!