There Seemed Nothing So True As A

Writing Is Both The Excursion Into And The Excursion Out Of One's Life. That Is The Queasy Paradox Of The Artistic Life. It Is The Thing That, Like Love, Removes One Both Painfully And Deliciously From The Ordinary Shape Of Existence. It Joins Another Queasy Paradox: That Life Is An Amazing, Hilarious, Blessed Gift And That It Is Also Intolerable.

Surely That Was Why Faith Had Been Invented: To Raise Teenagers Without Dying. Although Of Course It Was Also Why Death Was Invented: To Escape Teenagers Altogether.

When You Find Out Who You Are, You Will No Longer Be Innocent. That Will Be Sad For Others To See. All That Knowledge Will Show On Your Face And Change It. But Sad Only For Others, Not For Yourself. You Will Feel You Have A Kind Of Wisdom, Very Mistaken, But A Mistake Of Some Power To You And So You Will Sadly Treasure It And Grow It.

Most Things Good For Writing Are Bad For Life.

The People In This House, I Felt, And I Included Myself, Were Like Characters Each From A Different Grim And Gruesome Fairy Tale. None Of Us Was In The Same Story. We Were All Grotesques, And Self-riveted, But In Separate Narratives, And So Our Interactions Seemed Weird And Richly Meaningless, Like The Characters In A Tennessee Williams Play, With Their Bursting Unimportant, But Spell-bindingly Mad Speeches.