This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
She knew there were only small joys in life–the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through–and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.
So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.
She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.
The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They’re different. They’ve signed on the dotted line.
Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.
Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.
It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.
But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.
Anyone who’s read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.
Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn’t possibly be a bad thing.
Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain…
Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.
The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.
I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.
I don’t have a love life. I have a like life.’Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love…
It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.
She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.
Then, when it didn’t crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.
Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage – a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog.
Bummer,’ said Ira, his new word for “I must remain as neutral as possible” and “Your mother’s a whore.
Let’s make our own way,’ says the Mother, ‘and not in this boat.
I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.
You have a choice,” she told the class. “The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.
Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound.
I watched my friend Eleanor give birth,” she said. “Once you’ve seen a child born, you realize a baby’s not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you’ve been eating for nine months.
She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it.
So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time
Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, ‘Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.’
I’ve never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn’t say something funny.
You know, I’m just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don’t feel pressured to be otherwise.
I don’t sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.