And let the truth be your delight. . . Proclaim it. . . , but with a certain congeniality.
As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.
Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.
Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.
If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.
If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.
I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.
I lend people money, but I'd never lend something that would jeopardise a friendship if I didn't get it back.
I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying - it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.
What about your freedom?" he whispered in her ear over a minute later, bracing his hands palms down on the wall beside her head. He made no move to stop her as she stroked and petted every inch of that sinfully gorgeous chest, all hard muscle and gleaming skin overlaid with silky-rough strands of dark hair. "Idiot. " She nipped his jaw with her teeth. "The only freedom I ever wanted was the right to love you.
Every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. . . . Every now and then I ask myself, 'What is it that I want said?' I'd like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King Jr. , tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King Jr. , tried to love somebody.