time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as 'friendship,' as if that were the end of the matter.
Deborah EisenbergEverything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.
Deborah EisenbergYou write something and thereโs no reality to it. You canโt inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.
Deborah EisenbergIโm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. Itโs certainly the most miserable state to be in but itโs also tremendously gratifying, reallyโrage feels justified. And itโs an excellent substitute for action. Why would you want to sacrifice rage to go about the long, difficult, dreary business of making something more tolerable?
Deborah EisenbergEvery moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.
Deborah EisenbergIt's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.
Deborah EisenbergI always thought of writing as holy. I still do. Itโs not something to be approached casually.
Deborah EisenbergThe world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, "Hey, that's not fair."
Deborah EisenbergWhen one writes, thereโs the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.
Deborah EisenbergWhether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.
Deborah EisenbergHer professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.
Deborah EisenbergI don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.
Deborah EisenbergArt is inherently subversive. Itโs destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.
Deborah Eisenberg