– The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) On literature and writing Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. The fear is for what is still to be lost. What is lost is already behind the locked door. – On keeping a notebook, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which explores grief following the death of her husband You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) On loss 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. There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from. – Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power (essay originally published in Vogue in 1961) To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976) I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. – The White Album (1979)Ĭharacter – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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