More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I have a tongue in my head, and I used it.”
Telling a lie and wasting food were always things to be punished for.
We lived with cornfields and fields of soybeans spreading to the horizon;
“She was an only child, I think that had something to do with it,
“Well, he’s alone now, and she’s alone, and one day they’re going to die.”
I didn’t know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)
Still, I loved him.
He asked what we ate when I was growing up. I did not say, “Mostly molasses on bread.” I did say, “We had baked beans a lot.” And he said, “What did you do after that, all hang around and fart?” Then I understood I would never marry him.
but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.
I was in love, and life was moving forward, and that felt natural.
(O corn of my youth, you were my friend!—running
this is how I saw it.
I had not yet learned the depth of disgust city people feel for the truly provincial.
Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.
This is what I want to think. This is what I think.
I loved New York for this gift of endless encounters.
I like writers who try to tell you something truthful.
I think this is not unusual—to know little of our parents’ childhoods.
but how do we find out what the daily fabric of a life was?
because even poor people had TVs. Who would have believed it?
“I don’t think it mattered,” I said. “Of course it mattered.”
look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it.”
All of this, I am saying, made a huge impression on me, the indignities that we had forced onto these people.
we did not want to be judged by what we read,
So life goes on, I thought. (And now I think: It goes on, until it doesn’t.)
Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.
Every day she would start with a little of the sparkle, and within minutes the fatigue set in.
Because we all love imperfectly.
And she didn’t answer, and that—that makes me very angry, you know.”
“I see you’ve learned lots living in the big city.”
the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.
He was the only person I had told.
and so I took Vicky away in the fields until it was dark and we became more afraid of the dark than of our home.
we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.
Maybe I didn’t want to tell her that. Maybe that’s just what I think now as I write this.
but people are used to it now. Being used to it is not good.
“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways.
No one in this world comes from nothing.
I wrote down things I could not say.
in a marriage, in a life, money is power,
He is happy with anything I make for us to eat.
I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.
I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime,
At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house
and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me.
