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“IN THE LAST YEAR I’VE BECOME fixated on the idea of authenticity. This is partly because I feel at times I have lost sight of my authentic self, and I want more than anything to come close to it again, or at least to feel close to it. For me, authenticity means that how I act and what I say and how I actually feel around others is aligned, that I am connected to myself and to another person at the same time.”

“Here is a sentence from my own diary from February of 2021: “I have never wanted to write something tragic.” But what I think I want and what I am urged forward by is not always the same thing. I write to see what is inside my mind. For me, it is often far better, healthier, than recording what I know is already there.”

“Maybe I’ve not kept a diary because imagined lives have been more interesting for me to write down than my own. Yet my life comes into my fiction too, and now I am writing of it here, attached to my reading and my writing. Attached to darkness, solitude, the ocean. Attached to fiction.”

“Whatever the reason, darkness captivates, holds its own kind of sovereignty, and we need the change from daylight to night and back again. We need to come down from the day.”

“I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served; and when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth … White foods too—white miso, bean curd, fish cake, the white meat of fish—lose much of their beauty in a bright room.”

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“Their house with its lights becomes a stage, and the outside that gradually darkens is where the reader sits.
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“Maybe we get closer to something in the dark, or maybe it’s the opposite, which is why a stove is so nice at night, and sharing a meal, those points of warmth and light that naturally draw things together. Compared to dinner, lunch can be so boring, without the same kind of depth”

“ As the light in the sky dims, lights come on in the houses, and the lives of the people inside the houses seem more interesting then, heightened, as though each house is a stage, the lights illuminating a scene of domesticity. My life feels heightened too, and I appreciate the gentleness of the coming evening. ”

“to why lights in a dark city are pleasurable, and why not being able to see everything is pleasing too. At night we “walk abroad,” Calvino says, “using the imagination.” A walk in the afternoon offers its own kind of satisfaction, a sense of expansiveness and of health, but in the darkness is mystery, the great unknown. ”

“If he weren’t coming back, my time alone would mean something different.”

“Later, walking along the Bund in Shanghai, looking at the water and the buildings that ran alongside it, I felt close to some energy I hadn’t encountered before: a combination of the newness, for me, of China, and my own self, in it. I became new in China too. I’m sure I would have felt good if someone had been with me, but also different.”

“Later, walking along the Bund in Shanghai, looking at the water and the buildings that ran alongside it, I felt close to some energy I hadn’t encountered before: a combination of the newness, for me, of China, and my own self, in it. I became new in China too. I’m sure I would have felt good if someone had been with me, but also different.”

“Reading, all on its own, is one of the best things, and yet isn’t it nice to read in bed at the end of a long day, the darkness of the window meeting the soft light inside the room? Or on the beach, the hot sand and the sound of the waves coming together with the book. Things combine to become other things, other kinds of experiences.”

“Whether in art or writing, I’m drawn continuously to these projections, when one thing is placed on top of another without eclipsing it. Like two different time periods: both are present, and together they form something new. In that way it’s neither, but someplace else. We project sentences onto the blank pages of our notebooks, onto the screens of our laptops. What we see in our minds we make real.”

"We project what we fear, or what we dislike. Sometimes it’s reversed: we take on someone’s intonation, without even trying. We dress like them, or copy something we saw them do. We try to bring a projection of them onto our own selves.”

“We project onto people; we attach one person to another. We haven’t been able to let go of the first person, and try to connect them to a second. We’re either aware we’re doing this, or we’re not. We project our own self, what we want and what we want another person to be. "

“For better or worse, I have always combined one place with another, lived in one landscape while dreaming of a second.”

“While I enjoyed myself, talking and eating with my friends, and swimming, there was a part of me that was imagining we were at some other beach in some other place. I was projecting one ocean on top of another”

“ I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like.”

“Now I see that sometimes my focus gets even smaller, and that I am not always writing a sentence to tell a story, exactly, but simply to be in the space of a sentence, to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.”

“ The narrator of this story is always gazing at landscape (in paintings) and she is always in landscape (her own). She takes pleasure in each, and sometimes they give her trouble, but still she seems to live in both. When she looks at the paintings, they allow her to emerge into another kind of place, even though the physical space around her hasn’t actually changed.”

“I am reading Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, not watching it, but I see this so clearly: invisible words laid on top of a voice. A kind of drawing too—drawn lightly, perhaps. We get to this image, this way of being alive, this sort of architecture, through narrative. Like we get to the territory of Mary MacLane.”

“Outside the body and inside the mind, a novel can be like a landscape painting with a character moving through it, all of her violences and joys playing themselves out in only this setting, only this narrative, for in another it would not be so.”

“FOR YEARS NOW, WHENEVER I READ a short story or a novel, narrative has been impressing itself more and more visually in my mind. Or maybe it’s that my mind has gone more and more toward these fictional visions”

“You were in a rage, and then you were calm. You hid things, but you were real.
These characters whose names begin with L.”

“Pleasure, freedom, torment, emptiness: it is what I want my writing to express. I don’t know if I have ever actually expressed it.”

“One reads or writes a novel like one goes out to walk in the heat, or into the rain, to buy the persimmon and the butter.”

“Yet, I have never kept a diary. Or I have tried, but it never stuck. Again and again I would begin: with a very short entry, or else with a long one that would come to stand on its own, there in the beginning of a notebook, followed by all of those blank pages”

“I thought it might comfort me, although I noticed how little comfort was to be got from familiar things. How dare they stay the same when so much that mattered had changed? Why does your sweater senselessly smell of you, keep your shape when you are not there to wear it? I don’t want to be reminded of you, I want you.”

“Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?”