family
What grief we’d avoid if we knew how to transfer emotional experience across generations, as we do money or scientific knowledge.
Twitter, April 9, 2010.
Bands, especially when they’re good ones, can be like families, but unlike biological families—at least unlike my biological family—people in my band listen to each other.
Marc Ribot interview with Bill Frisell, BOMB magazine, Issue 79, Spring 2002.
Into the little port you cannot sail unwelcome at any hour of day or night.
Autumn 1869 letter to Louisa and Frances Norcross, Dickinson’s first cousins, in Letters: Emily Dickinson, selected and ed. by Emily Fragos (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2011), 55.
Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2010), 57.
Events are not what make up family life. Family life exists in the nonevents: the meals, the arguments, the reading together, the backyard soccer, the getting ready for school. We hid alone together on our mountain and reveled in the nonevents.
Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 288.
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 14.
My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 163.
As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 1.
It’s not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can’t run your family like a company. It doesn’t work.
“What I’ve Learned: Andy Grove,” by Mike Sager, Esquire, May 1, 2000.
When I think of your little faces I feel as the band does before it makes its first shout.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 477.