"But the wonder is what you can make a paradise out of."
"I observe, as long as possible, the delicious process of falling asleep. That awareness of subsiding into a different state is also happiness."
"To be an adult, I conclude, is to be close to death."
"Throughout my childhood and youth, she [my mother] is quite set on not teaching me how to cook or sew, lest such skills prevent me from turning to more interesting things."
"I want to tell A Story, Every Story, everything all at once ... I try to roll all the sounds into one, to accumulate more and more syllables ... the sounds have to resemble real syllables ... they can't disintegrate into brute noise for then I wouldn't be talking at all. I want articulation - but articulation that says the whole world at once."
"What I really want is to be transported into a space in which everything is as distinct, complete, and intelligible as in the stories I read."
"The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become - and such lucidity is a form of joy."
"Nothing fully exists until it is articulated."
"Primitive means vulgar or unenlightened."
"...a weeping willow by the pond that is just about the most graceful thing I know: it's so melancholy, and melancholy is synonymous with beautiful."
"To me, it's natural that a city should be very old... Age is one of the things that encloses me with safety; Cracow has always existed, it's a given, it doesn't change much. It has layers and layers of reality."
"My mother listens to the tales of those boyfriends with a sort of older woman tolerance."
"America is always ready to go to war, in contrast to those Soviet tanks, which are always wreathed in flowers and peaceful intentions. In a magazine, I read an article on lynching in the South and another one on the poverty of American workers. I also read Uncle Tom's Cabin, which makes me weep with frustration at the injustices perpetrated upon Tom and his family; perhaps America is a cruel place full of cold-hearted people."
"My idea of grace is fulfilling your talent completely, and my only idea of sin is misusing that gift. The dread of not becoming completely what you can be is so strong that sometimes later in life it will paralyze me. How horrible to do the wrong thing, the thing that doesn't express your essence - and how horrible to fall short of your powers, or to discover that they might be more meager than their seemingly limitless potential!"
"I stroke up images of Marek - they are not memories yet, he is too much alive within me - as if my will could made him materialize."
"Even fulfillment of a fantasy, it turns out, is different grin a fantasy of fulfillment."
"I feel that satisfaction and contentment are surely possible - more, that they're everyone's inalienable right - possibly even mine."
"They were more generous toward me than I was toward them; but then, a sense of disadvantage and inferiority is not a position from which one can feel the largeheartedness of true generosity."
"If you have no money, no language, and no accredited profession, what exactly do you turn your hand to?"
"So many people have made good; if you don't, it appears that you have only yourself to blame. This - corrosive logic - is the other side of the New World dream, the seemingly self- inflicted nightmare in which you toss and turn in gut-eating guilt."
"I don't have a silk slip, don't like to put on makeup, and these elaborate preparations are somehow disturbing to me, as if we were in a harem and remodeling ourselves into a special species - "girls" - so that we can appeal to that other, alien species, boys. They are supposed to come and get us, of course, but only after we have made ourselves into these appetizing and slightly garish bonbons. ... We're not going to show them who we are, we're going to show them what they want."
"I'm no colder than I've ever been, but I'm learning to be less demonstrative. I learn this from a teacher who, after contemplating the gesticulations with which I help myself describe the digestive system of a frog, tells me to "sit on my hands and then try talking." I learn my new reserve from people who take a step back when we talk, because I'm standing too close, crowding them. Cultural distances are different, I later learn in a sociology class, but I know it already. I learn restraint from Penny, who looks offended when I shake her by the arm in excitement, as if my gesture had been one of aggression instead of friendliness. I learn it from a girl who pulls away when I hook my arm through hers as we walk down the street - this movement of friendly intimacy is an embarrassment to her.
"I learn also that certain kinds of truth are impolite. One shouldn't criticize the person one is with, at least not directly. You shouldn't say, "You are wrong about that" - though you must say, "On the other hand, there is that to consider." You shouldn't say, "This doesn't look good on you," though you may say, "I like you better in the that other outfit." I learn to tone down my sharpness, to do a more careful conversational minuet.
"Perhaps my mother is right, after all; perhaps I'm becoming colder. After a while, emotion follows action, response grows warmer or cooler according to gesture. I'm more careful about what I say, how loud I laugh, whether I give vent to grief."
"'This is a society in which you are who you think you are. Nobody gives you your identity here, you have to reinvent yourself every day.'
"He is right, I suspect, but I can't figure out how this is done. You just say what you are and everyone believes you? ... But how do I choose from identity options available all around me? I feel, once again, as I did when facing those ten brands of toothpaste - faint from excess, paralyzed by choice."
"I try to remember what Mrs. Steiner - who with her daughters has guided me toward this step - said about living my own life. It is not so simple for me to accept this idea, to extricate myself from the mesh of family need and love, to believe in the merits of a separate life."
"I have been given the blessings and the terrors of multiplicity. ... If I want to assimilate into my generation, my time, I have to assimilate the multiple perspectives and their constant shifting. Who, among my peers, is sure of what is success and what failure? Who would want to be sure? Who is sure of purposes, meanings, national goals?"
"We've entered a period during which these very friends of mine will try to unwrap, unravel, and demolish every norm passed on to them from their parents and the culture at large; for a while, they will use their inheritance and their sense of entitlement for that most luxurious of rights, the right to turn down one's privileges; for a while at least, they will refuse to inherit the earth."
"This vigorous, handsome man is somebody I don't know at all, but he carries within himself a person whom I once knew completely."
"One cannot go against the grain of one's temperament forever. It's time again to rediscover the springs of my desires and love and appetite. ... It will be a complicated task, trying to break the carapace of fear and will, but by now, I know that if I don't set out to do it, I run the true peril of living an alien life."
"My father's fatalism, I explain to myself carefully, was perfectly suited to his conditions. But in my less threatening world, I need to develop the art of optimism and of benign expectations. ... There's no need to be sucked back into the vortex of these atavistic anxieties; they're misplaced and will only harm you; this Pavlovian pessimism will prevent you from rational planning, and from showing a cheerful, confident face, which is what you need, what your world requires."
"I've become a more self-controlled person over the years. ... I don't allow myself to be blown about this way and that helplessly; I've learned how to use the mechanisms of my will, how to look for symptom and root cause before sadness or happiness overwhelm me. I've gained some control, and control is something I need more than my mother did. I have more of a public life, in which it's important to appear strong."
"It's shameful to admit that sometimes things can go very wrong; It's shameful to choices that sometimes we have no control."
"The French, in the eighteenth century, classified ambition - a new phenomenon in the typography of behavior and emotion - as an illness."
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