Quotes from work

The Year of Magical Thinking

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

“Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.”

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”

“I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”