It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again.

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music