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“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“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.”

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”

“Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

“[O]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 before.”

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”

“Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.”

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

“Time is the school in which we learn”

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”