child
Every child understands a promise—if it is kept—and looks forward to the next promise.
The Cider House Rules (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1985), 26.
Where an adult uses his fingers, a child uses the palm of its hand, respectively the carpentry and masonry of gesture.
Sens-Plastique, trans. by Irving Weiss (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2008), 254–55.
Being with a three-year-old is like constantly being in the middle of a very bad breakup. Irrational tirades and operatic flights of rage are tempered with appeasing manipulation.
Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 168.
That’s how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible: Daughters and sons. First cousins. The neighbor kid. The first child. The last child. Your older brother. Some of their names have been forgotten; some never had names in the first place. They disappeared under heaps of advice. Don’t dwell. Have another child, a makeup baby. Life is for the living. But then another baby dies, and here they are again, in stories, and you will love them all, and—if you are the mother of a dead child yourself—they will keep coming to you. A couple I know just lost their baby. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. I know a couple…
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 136–37.
Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV (New York: Picador, 2009), 328.