The Door

by Magda Szabó

I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through. In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me screaming from my sleep.

One can tell instinctively what sort of flower a person would be if born a plant, and her genus certainly wasn’t the rose, with its shameless carmine unfolding — the rose is no innocent.

In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable.

I had long ago learned to ignore the shifting tectonic plates under the surface of her being.

Emerence had a low opinion of people who complained.

I would have loved to write, but as I’ve said, creativity requires a state of grace.