Sometimes A Flat-footed Sentence Is

The Worst Of It Is Over Now, And I Can't Say That I Am Glad. Lose That Sense Of Loss—you Have Gone And Lost Something Else. But The Body Moves Toward Health. The Mind, Too, In Steps. One Step At A Time. Ask A Mother Who Has Just Lost A Child, How Many Children Do You Have? "four," She Will Say, "—three," And Years Later, "three," She Will Say, "—four.

I Have Written Letters That Are Failures, But I Have Written Few, I Think, That Are Lies. Trying To Reach A Person Means Asking The Same Question Over And Over Again: Is This The Truth, Or Not? I Begin This Letter To You, Then, In The Western Tradition. If I Understand It, The Western Tradition Is: Put Your Cards On The Table.

I Know When A Story Is Finished When There Is Not A Single Thing More I Can Think To Do To It. And Since I Know At The Start What The Last Line Will Be, I Know When I've Reached That Point As Logically As I Can That It's Finished. As For The Rewriting-it's Not Foolproof, Of Course, But If You're Honest About Having Thought Of Every Possibility And You Still Come Back To What You Have, What More Can You Do?

I Had A Mother I Could Only Seem To Please With Verbal Accomplishments Of Some Sort Or Another. She Read Constantly, So I Read Constantly. If I Used Words That Might Have Seemed Surprising At A Young Age, She Would Recognize That And It Would Please Her.

I Meet A Person, And In My Mind I'm Saying Three Minutes; I Give You Three Minutes To Show Me The Spark.