#deliaephron

“I have this rule I live by: Only do what you can do. That means you’re never looking outside for what’s popular; you’re always looking inside for what’s true.”

Chronique du dernier été à Syracuse de Delia Ephron

Later I thought it was not love but loyalty we were expressing, the way two devoted friends might end a conversation or a telephone call. Loyalty: a more honorable pledge than love.

I must have understood more than I realized, how fragile things between us were. Now I do nothing but look at things other ways, flipping them up and around, examining them, trying to understand at the very least my own obtuseness. I think, I really do torture myself with this: Surprises don't come from people we know well, certainly not people we love. We call them surprises but they are inevitabilities. I must have been playing a role, a starring role, in an inevitability.

In life one rarely knows which remarks of the hundreds uttered in the course of a day will turn out to be auspicious. In fiction, foreshadowing is planted and flagged in some (hopefully or desperately) subtle way, drama demands it.

My problem: I wasn't living in my head anymore. Nothing much was going on there. That was why I loved traveling... I didn't feel a failure at the end of the day for not writing, the way I did these days at home. If I was present, that was enough.

To seduce, a man divines a woman's insecurity and compliments it....Conversation moves too fast to be consciously aware of all one knows.