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I never throw away photos, unless they are blurry. All of them, even the horrific ones, are an existential record of my life. Even the molecules of dust in the boxes are part and parcel of who I am—so goes the extreme rationale of a packrat, that and the certainty that treasure is buried in the debris.
As it turns out, throwing away photos of assholes does not remove them from consciousness. Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones.
I am a writer compelled by a subconscious neediness to know, which is different from a need to know. The latter can be satisfied with information. The former is a perpetual state of uncertainty and a tether to the past.
For writers, quirks are amulets to wonder over, and some have enough strangeness in them to become stories.
From an early age, I believed I had an extra amount of imagination. I did not come up with that assessment on my own. Many people had told me that.
I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul.
In my writing, I recognize myself.
Wonderment has always been my habit, even before I knew I was a writer. It still is today.
in writing fiction, the truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to my nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface. When I set out to write a story, I am feeling my way through a question, often a moral one, and attempting to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums. I don’t want an absolute answer. When writing fiction, I am trying to put down what feels true.
I already had very good intuitions about what pleased people, that is, I knew how to be calculating.
Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.
The condolence flowers wilted within the week, but we kept them until the petals fell off and the stems rotted and smelled like dead flesh. Life is fleeting. You can’t hang on to it. That was the meaning of those flowers.
The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost.
I was too self-conscious of what I was supposed to produce, and thus I avoided writing altogether.
They come as unexpected openings in portals that enable me to step into the scene I am writing. I am fully there, the observer, the narrator, the other characters, and the reader. I am clearly doing the writing, yet I do not know exactly what will happen in the story. I am not planning the next move. I am writing without hesitation and it feels magical, not logical.
As I continue to write, I don’t know what will happen, and yet I do. It is inevitable, like déjà vu moments, experienced as familiar as soon as I write them, the revelation of my spiritual twin—the intuitive part of me made conscious.
Spontaneous epiphanies always leave me convinced once again that there is no greater meaning to my life than what happens when I write.
No matter where I am in the world, music is the bringer of reverie. It is not simply pleasure. It is essential.
If you can move an audience to tears, they willingly give themselves to you. There is art, purpose, and manipulation in film music.
falling in love is similar to falling into an abyss.
She throws off thoughts of scandal and wraps desire around her like a warm protective
He has healed her, and only then does she realize she has been ill. He has warmed her, and only then does she realize her bones have been cold. She sees in his eyes that she truly is beautiful. She has astonished him.
From a child’s point of view, I thought that how I was judged each day determined how much love I would receive. A smarter child would be better loved, but so would a sicker one.
Praise, I had learned, was temporary, what someone else controlled and doled out to you, and if you accepted it and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar and suffer later when it was withdrawn.
She can’t take it anymore, the way her mother goes up and down, which makes them all go up and down, without anyone knowing what will happen.
My characters are witness to what I went through. In each story, we are untangling a knot in a huge matted mess. The work of undoing them one at a time is the most gratifying part of writing, but the mess will always be there.
Maybe she’s proud that she is among the few women still living whose feet were bound. Or maybe she wants me to admire how tiny her feet still are. As painful as they look, they are a marvel to behold, a condensed history of the suffering of Chinese women.
I have imagined what the truth might have been, based on my own emotional and moral character. Others have done the same. We see what we want to believe. We are all unreliable narrators when it comes to speaking for the dead.
As in childhood, I can be overwhelmed by uncertainty, and I find my inability to go forward to be maddening. It’s as if I were two people—one who is adventurous and wants to leap forward and experience the thrill, and the other the same little girl who refuses to budge because she does not trust that her father will be there.
we must follow the historic American position: “In God We Trust.” I would have pointed out that the first time “In God We Trust” was used it was on a penny in 1864, not when the United States was established. It took a while for those words to be added to a nickel, and much longer before they were added to a dollar bill. Trusting in God when it came to money matters did not make it a historic American position,
Fear, I think, is the worst element of religions of all kinds. It is used to justify more fear, as well as hatred, lack of compassion, intolerance, and war.
I am the author of a novel told by a doppelgänger in possession of my thoughts, who inserts her subconscious into my subconscious, which is rather like being unaware that someone has deftly slipped her hands into mine. My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are, and these words you are reading are entirely hers, which I still believe are mine.
This is what my writing is about. This is what my whole life is about. It is the loneliness of never fully sharing the truth of who I am because I have not yet found it, yet know only that the words will be inadequate. Words, private not public, are all I have to give in exchange for understanding what I think, the totality of what I’ve felt. I’ve known that since I was a child, that I would never be understood.
Avoidance is different from ignorance.
I read things I write and after a while I cannot tell what is bad and what is good.
We are never sure of the future, but if we can be sure of ourselves that’s important enough.
When a language has no native speakers, it cannot be resuscitated. It is forever dead. Latin is dead, Latina mortua est, and the Catholics could not save her. Let us grieve for her. Nos eam contristare.
How much of history is calumny chipped in stone, with vengeance as the last word and the last laugh.
To speak a language fluently, you must be persuasive in that language and not just argumentative. To know a language well, you must understand intent before words.
I misread “intentions” as “intestines” and now think the image is an apt one. Your intentions come in part from what was fed to you so long ago you’ve forgotten what it was, let alone whether it was good for you or if it simply staved off hunger, whether it was delicious or a kind of poison, an addicting taste.
