A Moveable Feast

Quotable.

“”Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”

“Memory is hunger.”

“To have come on all this new world of writing [...] was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you travelled too [...] there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems [...] in the daytime, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.”

and,

“People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world.

That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust it.”