Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last    a woman
in the old style    sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt    grandchild sliding
on    off my lap    a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa    ask him
to sit beside me for a minute    I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips

I know the bad stuff is coming, I just don't know when. That's why I try to fill the rest of the time with good stuff.

You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine everyday—that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.

What is the difference between failure and defeat? Failure always feels like our own fault, not just to live up to earlier promise but when we fail to make the grade. We fail an exam, are not defeated by it. We are always defeated by something, even by bad luck...We should also acknowledge the lure of defeat compared to with the steady drip of discouragement: the knowledge gained by the defeated compared to the slow erosion and eventual withdrawal of te terminally discouraged.

It's not only the ability to create; the capacity to appreciate also needs to be nurtured, sustained, and celebrated so that one does not become reduced to and defined by aversion, indifference, or hostility.

That's the thing about the process of knowledge absorption as you get older. You can't get it all on one plate, in a single helping. You have to read about the same events, slog through the same subjects, in multiple whoppers...Knowledge in the brain in overlapping and criss-crossed layers...Everything has gradually to become a kind of sediment in the brain, its ocean floor—a place so dark and mysterious that the fish aren't really fish, just creatures without brains or eyes, flattened by dead weight of water knowledge pressing down on them.

An irrational plan must be abandoned irrationally.

I remember when my future was more interesting than my past...Dreaming ahead not dreaming behind. Before I was pasteurized by balanced meals and chitchat and solvency and fatherhood and the increasing urge and diminishing dexterity to make people laugh.

Here is the key to small talk: let most of what strangers say pass right through you untasted, like medicine.

"And there is no better hiding place," he said, "then somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know."

That idea—of one's own life as something that had already been dictated—was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camaflouged their capacity to destroy...But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had another, a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.

Sometimes it seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into the knowledge of.

Friends are warmer than gold
when you're old.
And keeping them is harder
than you might suppose.

I sit here perpetually inventing new people
as if the population boom were not enough
and not enough terror and problems
God knows, But I know too,
that's the point. Never fear enough
to match delight, nor a deep enough abyss,
nor time enough, and there are always a few
stars missing.

They listened with great attention as John Grady answered their questions and they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.

I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

I wake and see
the morning like a god
in peacock-flower mantle dancing

on opalescent waves—
and can believe my furies have
abandoned for a time their long pursuit.

To say I am without fear—
it wouldn't be true.
I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I have learned to hide them,
to protect myself
from fulfillment: all happiness
attracts Fates' anger.
They are sisters, savages—
in the end they have
no emotion but envy.

Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy...What remedy can there be? What remedy can there be for what is not? You see? And where is the remedy that has no unforeseen consequence? What act does not assume a future that is itself unknown?...You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value.

Each on your own sea
in your own depths
with your own pride
with flag and arms and mouth
and bravery's feather-decked horror
each with your own heart
each
your own

The key to heaven has the power to open the gates of hell.

Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead?

I've never been more afraid than I have been curious. (Attributed to John Glenn)