My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.

Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective.

And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.