东西
Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how wide your cage was.
The things that make us human are the things that make us vulnerable.
Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything.
Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
The world is so full of simple, obvious, and beautiful things that it's a wonder anyone ever bothers to invent anything at all.
"We are all searching for something, and sometimes, what we find is not what we expected."
"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."
"I have always liked the phrase 'nursing a grudge,' because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts."
"We are all fleeing from something, and the things we flee from are often the things we most desire."
"A story is a way to say something that cannot be said any other way."
Don't criticize what you can't understand.
"Sometimes the most important things in life are the ones we can't see or touch, but we can feel them in our hearts."
"We are all searching for something, but we don't always know what it is. Sometimes it's a person, sometimes it's a place, and sometimes it's just a feeling."
I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do this best, for me.
People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen which keeps the other in its place.
The truth is that we are all searching for something, but we don't know what it is.