Authors, quotes I love

31 july 2013

From best-selling Seattle book, ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’

     ‘Getting into fights with people makes my heart race.  NOT getting into fights with people makes my heart race.  Even sleeping makes my heart race!  I’m lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader.  It’s a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline.  Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them.  For instance, during the day I might have mused, hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in B’s lunch.  That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I’VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN B’S LUNCH!!!  I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated race car grinding away in the corner.  This is energy I will need to get through the next day.  But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and w/ it any hope for a productive tomorrow.  There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans.  There goes basic human kindness.  I wake up in a sweat so thorough I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration.’

         One of the truest descriptions of an anxiety attack ever!

FROM NORA EPHRON’S description of NYC in I Remember Nothing:

         ‘I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in NY eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission.   I’d spent all those years imagining what NY was going to be like.  I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.

         ‘And I’d turned out to be right.’

Re:  failure

         ‘It seems to me the main thing you learn from a failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.  My biggest flop was a play I wrote.  It got what are known as mixed reviews – which is to say, it got some good reviews, but not in The NY Times.  It puttered along for a couple of months, and then it died.  It lost its entire investment.  It was the best thing I ever wrote, so it was a particularly heartbreaking experience.  If I think about it for more than a minute, I start to cry.’

(Her dying wish was to stage a revival – let’s DO IT, I say!  Let’s fucking make it happen!!  Berkeley Rep, anyone?)

Re: breakups:  ‘My religion is, Get Over It.’

And from Anne Lamott’s Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith:

Quote from Rumi:

Whatever there is, is only He,

your footsteps there in the dancing:

The whirling, see, belongs to you,

And you belong to the whirling.

Describing how her son managed to go from her room to his own by scooching down the hallway, a little at a time:

         ‘That’s me, trying to make any progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self-image:  scooch, scooch, stall; scooch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scooch.  I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival.  But no, it’s clog and slog and scooch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark.’

And, when on the verge of a binge:

         ‘I prayed for God to help me find my way out, and what I heard was, ‘Call a friend.’  But something edgier was speaking more loudly, and I pricked up my ears at the sound, even tho an old man at church once told me NEVER to give the devil a ride.  Because if he likes the ride, pretty soon he’ll want to drive.  It felt as if someone determined and famished had taken the wheel.’

Re:  an elderly friend who keeps changing her mind re selling her house:  ‘And all I knew to do was to be willing to feel really shitty with her.’

 

Quoting her friend Nell:

         ‘I asked her what was wrong, fearing it was bad cancer news, but she dismissed the very suggestion.  “Oh God, no” she said. “I am like TOTALLY sort of whatever about that,” which is a very Nell thing to say.  Also, if you think about it, it’s a profound spiritual stance, to be totally sort of whatever about something this scary.’