[b]Barbara Kingsolver
A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone–it’s still some real thing. It exists. You don’t get to fill it in with whatever you want.[/b]
Come on, how many of us don’t anyway?
It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she’d been. As opposed to the fool she was being now. People hang on to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.
Right, Kids?
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though.
Here though [as always] different strokes for different folks.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
Nope, can’t imagine it at all.
My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.
No, these lives actually do exist.
A novel! Why do you say this won’t liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!
No, this was actually once true.