In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution – is not my solution.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Cos if it’s encyclopedias we’ve got enough, like, information… and if it’s God, you’ve got the wrong house.
It’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
– You look fine. – Right. I look fine. Except I don’t, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man’s nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust.
And it’s time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings.
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
I’d decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.
She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
American houses…’ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
Jerome said, It’s like, a family doesn’t work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.
More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.
To her credit, though, Trace didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
The future’s another country, man… And I still ain’t got a passport.
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another.
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.
My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.
Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one’s own resources.
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?
One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.
They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.
Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.
You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. ‘A reality shaped around your own desires’ — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.
But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren’t half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it.
You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.
It’s like that quote: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?
She did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead.
This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust.
A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end – he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle.
(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.
That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him.
There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.
Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
You can’t state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity… that’s the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren’t given equality of opportunity.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is ‘faith.’
A lot of women, when they’re young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It’s easy to be friends when everyone’s 18.
My life is black and white and mixed. My mother’s a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy – it’s not an affectation. It’s also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.