I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.
What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life.
When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.
Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.
I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.
Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.
You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.
Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.
The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
I have a very beautiful room in my house... It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and... I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.
Usually my ideas are small.
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.
He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.
They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.
We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis
Bubble gum angels swooped from top margins or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs, maidens with golden hair dripped sea blue tears into the books spine, grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered spieces list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.
Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.
There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.
It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.
In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.
To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.
That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.
The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
She wanted out of the decorating scheme.
It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.
Don't waste your time on life.
The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.
That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within
No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
The time has to be right and the heart willing.
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.
The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.
Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
Scars crossed her welded wrists.
All wisdom ends in paradox.
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.
I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend
Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
The window was still open.” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever
our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.
If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.
A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.
We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.
In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
My goal in life is to become an adjective.
The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.
In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.
There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.
I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
