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I wanted there to be something to do in life besides mate and reproduce and die, and advertising was that, or it was for a long while.
Nostalgia for what’s new: The French probably have a word for that.
committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.
she felt extra compelling, stalking the edges of the park in a feline fashion that made me think of Phoebe, of the way a house cat hunts, so that one can’t tell whether it’s serious or only playing, or if it’s sure itself.
Always limit your reasons to three, the number of greatest credibility. Cite more and people will assume that you’re fabricating. Often correctly.”
Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon.
Whether there was another world in which I had yielded to his request, and whether in that world I would not be standing alone under the full moon at Silver Hill, contemplating the wreck of my previous twenty years.
People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.
Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs.
A motto favored by the ancients was solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking. Sometimes, I might add, by walking out.
The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.
I had always been praised, in public and in private, for my love of fun—for seeming young forever, forever young. But. Happiness and a love of fun are not coextensive, and their relationship may even be divergent. If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.
It had never been an effort for me to keep up my aggressive vivacity—until suddenly it was, and I didn’t know how to get it back or what to do in its absence.
We drift—all of us—farther from the fraught spasm of midnight, settling into the fog of another year.
No one survives the future, of course. Over the years I have rushed it, run from it, tried to shunt myself from its track. That these efforts did not succeed does not mean that I regret them.
a poet, a protofeminist, a successful career woman, and a mother
