Pesky Loves

Shame is the writer’s domain. When a writer looks at a blank page, she’s looking at her own shame.

“It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.”

“When someone insulted me, the Politeness and Nice Normal Girl programmes that I had to run every day in order to rub along with everyone overrode the other bit to the back of my brain that quietly said, That’s not okay. “

“The curse, he explained, our shared curse, was this: we could not gracefully integrate our authentic selves with the stark facts of reality, and the inability to resolve this tension causes us to suffer and to make other people suffer.”

“This is not a ‘meet people’ bar. This is a trauma bar.”

If I could not live except with tenderness, why was tenderness left out of my life?

I can hold a swimmer here

Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is but we follow it.

We go to the land of the dead all the time. We go in dreams.

I think [one’s] beauty. . . is fraudulent. Nothing to do with you.

Everything groans under treachery.

Before entering [my study], I take off my everyday work clothes, which are covered with mud and filth, and go through the ritual of donning my robes of state. Thus fitted out in appropriate dress, I enter the venerable courts of the ancients, where they kindly receive me.

Freeze! Don’t move

The things we forget may as well have never happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice.

The Answer