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Illness grabs the soul. You plunge in and out of hope, fearing you will never recover. All that I have been, all that I am, all that I might become no longer exist. I am alone. Nothing can distract from the truth of this finality.
Mary Gordon, who said, “A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”
Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.
The future has never had much reality to me. It still doesn’t.
Without plans, I believe in dreams, even if sometimes they melt like ice cream.
It is not very enjoyable being Thomas Cromwell to your Henry VIII. Henry had all the fun, and Cromwell ended up declared a heretic and beheaded, though I do hope to avoid that fate.
When I felt things were out of control, I would seek to create order over what I could, vacuuming and dusting, rearranging and throwing things away.
Richard Avedon said to me, “I don’t know if the kind of happiness you’re looking for exists anywhere.”
Avedon was right: the kind of happiness I was looking for didn’t exist. It was what Sontag wrote of, “The inescapable longing for something you never had.”
I’ve always had passion, what John O’Hara called a “rage to live.” Yet part of me craved stability, which is incompatible with that rage.
Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than hearing about your sex life was discovering it was more interesting than my own.
