I Truly Think That You Can't Go

She Had Always Been A Reader… But Now She Was Obsessed. Since Her Discovery Of The Book Hoard Downstairs From Her Job, She’d Been Caught Up In One Such Collection Of People And Their Doings After The Next…the Pleasure Of This Sort Of Life – Bookish, She Supposed It Might Be Called, A Reading Life – Had Made Her Isolation Into A Rich And Even Subversive Thing. She Inhabited One Consoling Or Horrifying Persona After Another…that She Was Childless And Husbandless And Poor Meant Less Once She Picked Up A Book. Her Mistakes Disappeared Into It. She Lived With An Invented Force.

Cold Sinks In, There To Stay. And People, They'll Leave You, Sure. There's No Return To What Was And No Way Back. There's Just Emptiness All Around, And You In It, Like Singing Up From The Bottom Of A Well, Like Nothing Else, Until You Harm Yourself, Until You Are A Mad Dog Biting Yourself For Sympathy. Because There Is No Relenting.

Don't Read Anything Except What Destroys The Insulation Between Yourself And Your Experience.

In Order To Purify Yourself, You Have To Understand Yourself, Father Trais Went On. Everything Out In The World Is Also In You. Good, Bad, Evil, Perfection, Death, Everything. So We Study Our Souls.

You Really Need To Approach Each Book As If You Have Been A Failure. . . . If You Start To Believe Your Flap-copy, You're Finished As A Writer.