It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.
To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.
You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously.
Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new?
Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.
It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.
[She] had — even before the nurses had wiped the baby clean, even before they had cut the cord — touched every part of her child, her tiny flaring nostrils and the faint shadows of her eyebrows and the womb-slicked soles of her feet, making certain she was wholly present, learning her by heart.
Mrs. Richardson, who had always been so kind to her, who had said so many nice things about her. Whose shining, polished surface had entranced Pearl with her own reflection.
She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.
“You ready for this party, Pearl?” The answer, of course, was no.
Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully.
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
He considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.
Every child begins the world again, to some extent.
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
One day when my husband dropped him off, he heard a little girl stand up to a naysayer and shout, “Boys can like beautiful things, too!”
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
How many
are busy going elsewhere getting nowhere;
There is no gulf between the stuff of daily life and the stuff of poetry, save that one is the raw material of the other…
How does a city wish to be? Look to the library. A library is the gift a city gives to itself.
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
It has always been curious to me that the first rule of improvisation is that you have to agree and the first rule of playwriting is that your characters have to disagree…