I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
You throw the kitchen sink at your early books. You put everything in there. It's like when you meet a new girlfriend or boyfriend, you tell them all your best stories. By the time you have been married for 10 years, they are crying, 'Shut up!'
The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero.
For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color." - Ernest Hemingway.
It's a strange feeling, being so utterly surrounded by her. Her life scent is on everything. She's on me and under me and next to me. It's as if the entire room is made out of her.
Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion
If you're all loaded up on love, you haven't got anywhere else to go.
Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.
I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like a 'gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.' Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
I just imagine that every song in and of itself is great, but when you add them all up, it's too much of me maybe.
Before 'Fallen,' I'd written love stories and more love stories. I'd fallen in love with love stories - but they were also beginning to feel just a little bit too insular, too small.
Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.
I'm numb and I'm tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I'd been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I'm soaked to the skin with emotion.
Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.
These beautiful days ... do not exist as mere pictures - maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will ... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.
The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.
Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel.
You think, I love more everyday. I love more everyday, more everyday, I couldn't possibly love any more, I'm going to blow up. And then you blow up. Your chest actually starts to hurt. You love so much you think I can't love any more. And then you love so much more than you ever dreamed possible.
That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.
And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.
There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.
If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.
It really sucks when music is so perfect you just don't need to hear it anymore.
