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It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgoing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.
The trouble with comparing yourself to others is that there are too many others. Using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else.
Some people ditch friends and lovers because it’s easier to get new ones than to resolve conflicts with the old ones, particularly if resolving a conflict requires one to admit error or practice mercy. I’m describing an asshole. But what if the asshole thinks he’s ditching an asshole?
Inner beauty can fade, too.
The waterbirds near my house are in middle school. The coots’ voices crack; the seagulls bully the ducks; the egret just got braces and stands, humiliated, by himself.
Many bird names are onomatopoetic—they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.
Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.
I never joined Facebook because I want to preserve my old longings. And also yours.
We like stories that are false and seem true (realist novels), that are true and seem false (true crime), that are false and seem false (dragons and superheroes), or that are true and seem true, but it’s harder to agree on what that is.
I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying. Then again, what if trying, even in the face of certain failure, feels as good as accomplishing? What if it’s even better? And here we are again.
I can’t bear to think of my dead friend, but I don’t mind rereading a few things that have nothing to do with him and that always move me to tears. The grief reservoir empties to a manageable level. In this way I can mourn him without having to think about him.
There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you.
You’ll never know what your mother went through.
I’ve known a few people who approached the act as a perfectible art. I’ve known some great perverts, too. Others were in love. Desire abandoned them all. It’s the ones I didn’t fuck, or didn’t fuck enough, or haven’t fucked enough, that I still dream about.
The dark owns everything, but our sun comes out often enough that we think the universe is half dark, half light.
Perfection and beauty overlap, but incompletely.
The thing to remember is that no one ever finds out that you don’t know what you’re doing.
The thing to remember is that I only have about thirty-five, forty years left to live.
My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must find one’s voice, as if it’s there inside you, ready to be turned on like a player piano. Like character, its very existence depends on interaction with the world.
The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.
After I stopped hoping to outgrow them, my fears were no longer a burden. Hope is what made them a burden.
When my husband does the dishes he always leaves some platter in the sink, some surface unwiped. I tried to correct the behavior until I remembered that if I finish everything in my Work in Progress folder I’m afraid I’ll die.
I can’t believe this is happening, I thought the first time we fucked, fourteen years ago, and keep thinking. We married other people, had children. I still can’t believe it. I might never believe it.
Even if I’m writing for no audience, I’m appealing to the audience of all who ever agreed that A is A: all readers who have ever lived.
I sat at my college desk, looked out the window at the three church spires, pretended it was the nineteenth century, and felt privately embarrassed. I remember the embarrassment better than I remember the view.
In a long relationship, you learn exactly what to do to get each other off. It becomes mechanical. But you also learn exactly what to do to enrage each other. It becomes mechanical. The pleasures of a long relationship are the things that you never quite learn about the other—the ways in which you remain strangers.
I feared he’d drag me across the country again, so I railed against California. He feared I’d never leave New York again, so he railed against New York. We each feared the other would refuse to negotiate, so in the face of imaginary approaching trains, we sent out opposing trains, meeting perceived unreasonableness with equal or greater unreasonableness.
Who seems a harmless fool to those above him is a malevolence to those beneath.
When someone insults you, it will infuriate him if you pretend to misunderstand the insult as a compliment.
Interesting people aren’t interested in appearing interesting.
A friend visits with a basket in each hand, her twin sons. She feeds them, changes them, carries them, and lays them down with perfunctory attention. She says, Sometimes I think, “It’s been seven months! Where in the world is their mother?”
Assume that the most annoying person you know, the one who won’t leave you alone, is in love with you.
Your pet represents your human partner. It also represents you.
The first time you love someone who doesn’t love you back it seems wrong, not morally but logically, a river flowing up a mountain. How can such a feeling be wrong? You’ll return to that very river, as many times as it takes.
Outsiders pretend to be insiders, and it makes them unlikable. Insiders pretend to be outsiders, and we love to play along.
The most likable person you know just might be a sociopath.
Parental love is a one-way, all-consuming love, like a crush that asks nothing of its object. You can inhabit it totally, and no one will try to heal you of it.
One must be able to empathize with a suicide yet not become one.
My husband sees the apartment as a series of particulate spaces and moments, but I see it as one entity, so we disagree about its tidiness.
Whatever you’re feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.
A false compliment can land if the recipient wishes it were true.
You can choose your friends but not your friendships.
Among those with less, I try to distract them from the imbalance. Doing so feels like theft. Among those with more, I try to distract them from the imbalance. Doing so feels like charity.
Today, for the first time, I sent a fan letter to someone younger than I am. It marks a change in my relationship to the world.
Keeping a debt is a gift to the giver: it renders him generous.
There must be birds that sing or fly better or worse than other birds of their species; I’ve never noticed any. But the birds have.
People congregate according to their relative levels of luck.
If you want to know someone’s secret, don’t ask a thing. Just listen.
