Image: Jeremy Goldstein, CC BY 2.0
36 quotes
novelist
“The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.”
"Come what may and hell to pay."
on Courage
"Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do."
on Compassion
"No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it."
on Language
"It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement."
on History
"Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life."
on Health
"To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward."
on Writing
"Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history."
on Truth
"Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history"
"To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental."
on Art
"In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place."
on Identity
"Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence."
on Family
"The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase."
on Philosophy
"What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine."
on Love
"But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off."
"A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better."
"Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone."
on Grief
"What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it."
"I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve."
on Stress
"Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face."
"There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's."
on Life
