The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

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.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

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.