Metaphor and Memory

We ought to declare our gratitude for these non-existent works on two counts: first, writing that is confined to mere potentiality is in almost all instances reliably superior to words actually on a page.

Life is that which—pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially—interrupts.

Rupture doesn’t attract me: I would rather inherit coherence than smash and start over again with enigma.

The sentence I am writing is my cabin and my shell, compact, self-sufficient.

She was all profusion, abundance, fabrication

She was an optimist who ignored trifles; for her, God was not in the details but in the intent

She thought herself capable of doing anything, and did everything she imagined. But nothing was perfect. There was always some clear flaw, never visible head-on. You had to look underneath, where the seams were. The corn thrived, though not in rows. The stalks elbowed one another like gossips in a dense little village.

For a long time it hardly recognized itself for what it was, and was often confused with the magazine article—that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap thing.

It may be that the little magazines no longer define themselves as uniformly as they once did because they cannot.

Their work will not be taken for work.