Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it…Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.
What these men represented was not ‘The West’ but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.
[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.
Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.
Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested – ask any doctor – that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.
Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
…nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.
He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them
it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.
The death of a parent, he wrote, ‘despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago…
I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?
I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure,” or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
…the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
their suburbia house in Brentwood” was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…The way I write is who I am, or have become…
I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear>
I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.
Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.
I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.
Privilege” is something else.”Privilege” is a judgment.”Privilege” is an opinion.”Privilege” is an accusation.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is a dissatisfaction with self.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking what I’m looking at what I see and what it means what I want and what I fear.
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not…. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
I’m not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
Strength is one of those things you’re supposed to have. You don’t feel that you have it at the time you’re going through it.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.