Great Throughts Treasury

"I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave."

"I wasn't even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I'd exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath."

"I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties ? unlike now ? female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite"

"I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable."

"I was tired of her getting away with being so young."

"I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted... You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts."

"I wish I was ignorant, so I didn't know how ignorant I am."

"I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one?s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I?m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I?m sorry it?s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it."

"I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn"

"I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves."

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"

"I would like to believe this is a story I?m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it?s a story I?m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."

"I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of blue-green leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to follow you up the long stairway again and become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."

"I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown."

"I would pour for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living."

"I?ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew it meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that?s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before."

"I?m just as human as you. But it?s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war."

"I?m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it?s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterwards, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear-holes, the nose-hairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children."

"I?m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it."

"I?ve been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence."

"I?m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don?t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder."

"I'd like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please."

"If I have an egg, what more can I want?"

"If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly."

"If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?"

"If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice."

"If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it?s not easy being quiet and good, it?s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you?ve already fallen over; you don?t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength."

"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."

"If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from."

"If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't."

"If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror."

"If I was going to do something I didn't want to do, I at least wanted to be remunerated for it."

"If the stock market exists, so must previous lives."

"if the teenage kids want to carouse, that's where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope, and grope around in one another's clothing as if they've just invented it, and smash their parents cars up on the way back to town."

"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."

"If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It?s more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech."

"If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves."

"If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged."

"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."

"If you had to choose three words to distill the essence of Britain, America and Canada, the words would be island, frontier, and survival."

"If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart."

"If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say."

"If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time."

"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next?if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions?you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."

"If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude."

"If you?re not annoying somebody, you're not alive."

"Ignoring isn?t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

"I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me."

"I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real."