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At Night The Cries Of Cats Making Love Or Fighting, Their Caterwauling In The Dark, Told Us That The World Was Pure Emotion, Flung Back And Forth Among Its Creatures, The Agony Of The One-eyed Siamese No Different From That Of The Lisbon Girls, And Even The Trees Plunged In Feeling.

-Jeffrey Eugenides

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At Night The Cries

Jeffrey Eugenides

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At Night The Cries Of Cats Making Love Or Fighting, Their Caterwauling In The Dark, Told Us That The World Was Pure Emotion, Flung Back And Forth Among Its Creatures, The Agony Of The One-eyed Siamese No Different From That Of The Lisbon Girls, And Even The Trees Plunged In Feeling.

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I Was Thinking How Amazing It Was That The World Contained So Many Lives. Out In These Streets People Were Embroiled In A Thousand Different Matters, Money Problems, Love Problems, School Problems. People Were Falling In Love, Getting Married, Going To Drug Rehab, Learning How To Ice-skate, Getting Bifocals, Studying For Exams, Trying On Clothes, Getting Their Hair-cut And Getting Born. And In Some Houses People Were Getting Old And Sick And Were Dying, Leaving Others To Grieve. It Was Happening All The Time, Unnoticed, And It Was The Thing That Really Mattered.

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We're All Well-acquainted With Depression, We All Know What The Low Moods Are, But The Mania Was Not Something I Knew Much About. I Didn't Know That It Would Make Someone Dress Extravagantly Or Start To Pun, And To Stay Up And Drink.

I Think It Is Important To Remind People Of The Extent Of Our Free Will.

It Was Something Every Child Knew How To Do, Maintain A Direct And Full Connection With The World. Somehow You Forgot About It As You Grew Up, And Had To Learn It Again.

Children Learn To Speak Male Or Female The Way They Learn To Speak English Or French.

The Window Was Still Open.” Mr Lisbon Said. “i Don’t Think We’d Ever Remembered To Shut It. It Was All Clear To Me. I Knew I Had To Close It Or Else She’d Go On Jumping Out Of It Forever

Every Novelist Should Possess A Hermaphroditic Imagination.

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No Reason To Mention My Peculiarities, My Wandering In The Maze These Many Years, Shut Away From Sight. And From Love, Too.

It Was One Of Those Humid Days When The Atmosphere Gets Confused. Sitting On The Porch, You Could Feel It: The Air Wishing It Was Water.

We Realized That The Version Of The World They Rendered For Us Was Not The Version Of The World They Really Believed In.

Virgin Suicides

I'd Like To Have A Word For 'the Sadness Inspired By Failing Restaurants' As Well As For 'the Excitement Of Getting A Room With A Minibar.

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The Perishable Nature Of Love Is What Gives Love Its Profound Importance In Our Lives. If It Were Endless, If It Were On Tap, Love Wouldn't Hit Us The Way It Does.

We Knew That Cecilia Had Killed Herself Because She Was A Misfit, Because The Beyond Called To Her, And We Knew That Her Sisters, Once Abandoned, Felt Her Calling From That Place, Too.

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Virgin Suicides

Chunks Of His Life Fell Away, So That While We Were Moving Ahead In Time, He Was Moving Back.

It Didn't Matter In The End How Old They Had Been, Or That They Were Girls, But Only That We Had Loved Them, And That They Hadn't Heard Us Calling, Still Do Not Hear Us, Up Here In The Tree House With Our Thinning Hair And Soft Bellies, Calling Them Out Of Those Rooms Where They Went To Be Alone For All Time, Alone In Suicide, Which Is Deeper Than Death, And Where We Will Never Find The Pieces To Put Them Back Together.

They Were Bound For College, Husbands, Child-rearing, Unhappiness Only Dimly Perceived- Bound, In Other Words, For Life.

That's The Way I Will Write Characters, Put A Fair Amount Of Myself In Them, And Then Everyone Else Who Was Like That Person, I Will Pick And Choose.

My Family Suffered. My Hair Turned Up In Every Corner, Every Drawer, Every Meal. Even In The Rice Puddings Tessie Made, Covering Each Little Bowl With Wax Paper Before Putting It Away In The Fridge--even Into These Prophylactically Secure Desserts My Hair Found Its Way! Jet Black Hairs Wound Themselves Around Bars Of Soap. They Lay Pressed Like Flower Stems Between The Pages Of Books. They Turned Up In Eyeglass Cases, Birthday Cards, Once--i Swear--inside An Egg Tessie Had Just Cracked. The Next-door Neighbor's Cat Coughed Up A Hairball One Day And The Hair Was Not The Cat's.

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Lux’s Frequent Forged Excuses From Phys. Ed. She Always Used The Same Method, Faking The Rigid T’s And B’s Of Her Mother’s Signature And Then, To Distinguish Her Own Handwriting, Penning Her Signature, Lux Lisbon, Below, The Two Beseeching L’s Reaching Out For Each Other Over The Ditch Of The U And Barbed-wire X.

Girls Forbidden To Dance Would Only Attract Husbands With Bad Complexions And Sunken Chests.

-who Are You, Anyway? -just Someone Who Knows, From Personal Experience, How Attractive It Can Be To Think You Can Save Somebody Else By Loving Them.

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That Was The Deal Basically: Catatonia Without; Frenzy Within

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Planning Is For The World's Great Cities, For Paris, London, And Rome, For Cities Dedicated, At Some Level, To Culture. Detroit, On The Other Hand, Was An American City And Therefore Dedicated To Money, And So Design Had Given Way To Expediency.

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Detroit's A Great Music Town. If Your Interaction With It Was Mainly Musical, I'm Sure You Have A Good Opinion Of The Place.

Dr. Armonson Stitched Up Her Wrist Wounds. Withen 5 Minutes Of The Transfusion He Declared Her Out Of Danger. Chucking Her Under The Chin, He Said, "what Are You Doing Here, Honey? Your Not Even Old Enough To Know How Bad Life Gets." And It Was Then Cecelia Gave Orally What Was To Be Her Only Form Of Suicide Note, And A Useless One At That, Because She Was Going To Live: "obviously, Doctor," She Said, "you've Never Been A 13 Year Old Girl.

Heartbreak Is Funny To Everyone But The Heartbroken.

The Following Doodle: A Girl With Pigtails Is Bent Under The Weight Of A Gigantic Boulder. Her Cheeks Puff Out, And Her Rounded Lips Expel Steam. One Widening Steam Cloud Contains The Word Pressure, Darkly Retraced.

At Night The Cries Of Cats Making Love Or Fighting, Their Caterwauling In The Dark, Told Us That The World Was Pure Emotion, Flung Back And Forth Among Its Creatures, The Agony Of The One-eyed Siamese No Different From That Of The Lisbon Girls, And Even The Trees Plunged In Feeling.

But Maybe The Charm Bracelets Understood More About Life Than I Did. From An Early Age They Knew What Little Value The World Placed In Books, And So Didn't Waste Their Time With Them. Whereas I, Even Now, Persist In Believing That These Black Marks On White Paper Bear The Greatest Significance, That If I Keep Writing, I Might Be Able To Catch The Rainbow Of Consciousness In A Jar.

Virgin Suicide What Was That She Cried? No Use In Stayin' On This Holocaust Ride She Gave Me Her Cherry She's My Virgin Suicide

Words, Words, Word. Once, I Had The Gift. I Could Make Love Out Of Words As A Potter Makes Cups Of Clay. Love That Overthrows Empire. Love That Binds Two Hearts Together, Come Hellfire & Brimstone. For Sixpence A Line, I Could Cause A Riot In A Nunnery. But Now -- I Have Lost My Gift. It's As If My Quill Is Broken, As If The Organ Of My Imagination Has Dried Up, As If The Proud -illegible Word- Of My Genius Has Collapsed.

That Since Cecilia’s Suicide, The Lisbon’s Could Hardly Wait For The Night To Forget Themselves In Sleep

You Can Tell When Something's Not Moving Forward Anymore. When The Doubts You Have About It Don't Go Away.

Scars Crossed Her Welded Wrists.

I'm Constantly Having Doubts And Moments Of Depression And Then Excitement And Then Back Into The Slough Of Despond.

There Was Nowhere I Could Go That Wouldn't Be You.

And She Had Succeeded, On The Second Try, In Hurling Herself Out Of The World

Virgin Suicides

She Lost Much Of Her Appetite. At Night, An Invisible Hand Kept Shaking Her Awake Every Few Hours. Grief Was Physiological, A Disturbance Of The Blood. Sometimes A Whole Minute Would Pass In Nameless Dread - The Bedside Clock Ticking, The Blue Moonlight Coating The Window Like Glue - Before She`d Remember The Brutal Fact That Had Caused It.

They Made Us Participate In Their Own Madness, Because We Couldn't Help But Retrace Their Steps, Rethink Their Thoughts, And See That None Of Them Led To Us.

My House Fly Theory Is Related To My Theory About Why Time Seems To Go Faster As You Get Older." "why's That?" The Girl Asked. "it's Proportional," Leonard Explained. "when You're Five, You've Only Been Alive A Couple Thousand Days. But By The Time You're Fifty, You've Lived Around Twenty Thousand Days. So A Day When You're Five Seems Longer Because It's A Greater Percentage Of The Whole.

The Humming Of My Parents' Voices From Behind My Bedroom Wall, Which Throughout My Childhood Had Filled Me With A Sense Of Security, Had Now Become A Source Of Anxiety And Panic.

The Mind Self-edits. The Mind Airbrushes. It's A Different Thing To Be Inside A Body Than Outside. From Outside, You Can Look, Inspect, Compare. From Inside There Is No Comparison.

I Always Work In A Room Where There's No Internet To Keep From Being Distracted So Easily.

I Was Unemployable When I Got Out Of College.

What Are You Doing Here, Honey? You're Not Even Old Enough To Know How Bad Life Gets." (...) "obviously, Doctor," She Said, "you've Never Been A Thirteen-year-old Girl.

The Ideas For My Books Come About In Two Ways. There Can Be An Intellectual Idea That Seems To Be The Reason For Writing The Book. [...] The Other Motive Is Unconscious. There Is Something Deeply Psychological And Emotional That Draws Me To The Material In The First Place.

Bubble Gum Angels Swooped From Top Margins Or Scraped Their Wings Between Teeming Paragraphs, Maidens With Golden Hair Dripped Sea Blue Tears Into The Books Spine, Grape-colored Whales Spouted Blood Around A Newspaper Item (pasted In) Listing Arrivals To The Endangered Spieces List. Six Hatchlings Cried From Shattered Shells Near An Entry Made On Easter. Cecilia Had Filled The Pages With A Profusion Of Colors And Curlicues, Candyland Ladders And Striped Shamrocks.

We Listened To Them, But It Was Clear They'd Received Too Much Therapy To Know The Truth.

The More She Thought About It, The More Madeleine Understood That Extreme Solitude Didn't Just Describe The Way She Was Feeling About Leonard. It Explained How She'd Always Felt When She Was In Love. It Explained What Love Was Like And, Just Maybe, What Was Wrong With It.

My Goal In Life Is To Become An Adjective.

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Narrative Voice

She Held Herself Very Straight, Like Audrey Hepburn, Whom All Women Idolize And Men Never Think About.

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The Only Way We Know It's True Is That We Both Dreamed It. That's What Reality Is. It's A Dream Everyone Has Together.

There's A Kind Of Acting That Goes On In My Head When I'm Writing A Character Where I Put Myself In Their Place.

The Trees Like Lungs Filling With Air. My Sister, The Mean One, Pulling My Hair.

I Have A Good Memory For Early Life. My Visual Memory Is Good About Childhood And Adolescence, And Less Good In The Last 10 Years. I Could Probably Tell You Less What Happened In The Last 10 Years. I Remember What Houses Looked Like, Sometimes They Just Pop Into My Head.

I Want An Ending That’s Satisfying. I’m More Of A Classical Writer Than A Modernist One In That I Want The Ending To Be Coherent And Feel Like An Ending. I Don’t Like When It Just Seems To Putter Out. I Mean, Life Is Chaotic Enough.

The Lover`s Discourse Was Of An Extreme Solitude. The Solitude Was Extreme Because It Wasn`t Physical. It Was Extreme Because You Felt It While In The Company Of The Person You Loved. It Was Extreme Because It Was In Your Head, The Most Solitary Of Places.

I Think The Suicides In My First Book Came From The Idea Of Growing Up In Detroit. If You Grow Up In A City Like That You Feel Everything Is Perishing, Evanescent And Going Away Very Quickly.

In The End, The Tortures Tearing The Lisbon Girls Pointed To A Simple Reasoned Refusal To Accept The World As It Was Handed Down To Them, So Full Of Flaws.

Jerome Was Sliding And Climbing On Top Of Me And It Felt Like It Had The Night Before, Like A Crushing Weight. So Do Boys And Men Announce Their Intentions. They Cover You Like A Sarcophagus Lid. And Call It Love.

In Madeleine's Face Was A Stupidity Mitchell Had Never Seen Before. It Was The Stupidity Of All Normal People. It Was The Stupidity Of The Fortunate And The Beautiful, Of Everybody Who Got What They Wanted In Life And So Remained Unremarkable.

When You Stood Between Somebody You Loved And Death, It Was Hard To Be Awake And It Was Hard To Sleep.

The Girls Took Into Their Own Hands Decisions Better Left To God. They Became Too Powerful To Live Among Us, Too Self-concerned, Too Visionary, Too Blind.

The Worst Thing About Religion Was Religious People.

In The End We Had The Pieces Of The Puzzle, But No Matter How We Put Them Together, Gaps Remained, Oddly Shaped Emptinesses Mapped By What Surrounded Them, Like Countries We Couldn't Name.

If You Talk To Geneticists They Are Constantly Finding That Your Genes Are Being Switched On And Off Because Of The Environment. Genes Alone Do Not Determine An Exact Path In Your Life.

I Approach Writing Female Characters The Same Why I Approach Writing Male Characters. I Never Think I'm Writing About Women, I Think I'm Writing About One Woman, One Person. And I Try To Imagine What She Is Like, And Endow Her With A Lot Of My Own Thoughts And History.

They're Just Memories Now. Time To Write Them Off.

Emotions, In My Experience Aren't Covered By Single Words. I Don't Believe In "sadness," "joy," Or "regret." I'd Like To Have At My Disposal Complicated Hybrid Emotions, Germanic Traincar Constructions Like, Say, "the Happiness That Attends Disaster." Or: "the Disappointment Of Sleeping With One's Fantasy." ... I'd Like To Have A Word For "the Sadness Inspired By Failing Restaurants" As Well As For "the Excitement Of Getting A Room With A Minibar." I've Never Had The Right Words To Describe My Life.

But In The End It Wasn't Up To Me. The Bigs Things Never Are. Birth, I Mean, And Death. And Love. And What Love Bequeaths To Us Before We're Born.

Everyone Struggles Against Despair, But It Always Wins In The End. It Has To. It's The Thing That Lets Us Say Goodbye.

Being A Writer Is A Solitary Life. So The Little Part Of Me That's An Actor Still Enjoys The Theatrical Part Of Reading And Doing The Voices And Telling The Story.

It's Often Said That A Traumatic Experience Early In Life Marks A Person Forever, Pulls Her Out Of Line, Saying, "stay There. Don't Move.

We Knew, Finally, That The Girls Were Really Women In Disguise, That They Understood Love And Even Death, And That Our Job Was Merely To Create The Noise That Seemed To Fascinate Them.

That Was When Leonard Realized Something Crucial About Depression. The Smarter You Were, The Worse It Was. The Sharper Your Brain, The More It Cut You Up.

For The Eternity That Lux Lisbon Looked At Him, Trip Fontaine Looked Back, And The Love He Felt At That Moment, Truer Than All Subsequent Loves Because It Never Had To Survive Real Life, Still Plagued Him, Even Now In The Desert, With His Looks And Health Wasted. 'you Never Know What'll Set The Memory Off,' He Told Us. 'a Baby's Face. A Bell On A Cat's Collar. Anything.' They Didn't Exchange A Single Word. But In The Weeks That Followed, Trip Spent His Days Wandering The Halls, Hoping For Lux To Appear, The Most Naked Person With Clothes On He Had Ever Seen.

Winter Is The Season Of Alcoholism And Despair.

They Had Killed Themselves Over Our Dying Forests, Over Manatees Maimed By Propellers As They Surfaced To Drink From Garden Hoses; They Had Killed Themselves At The Sight Of Used Tires Stacked Higher Than The Pyramids; They Had Killed Themselves Over The Failure To Find A Love None Of Us Could Ever Be. In The End, The Tortures Tearing The Lisbon Girls Pointed To A Simple Reasoned Refusal To Accept The World As It Was Handed Down To Them, So Full Of Flaws.

They Thought Depression Was Like Bieng 'depressed'. They Thought It Was Like Being In A Bad Mood, Only Worse. Therefore, They Tried To Get Him To Snap Out Of It.

Yes, You Need A Passport To Prove To The World That You Exist. The People At Passport Control, They Cannot Look At You And See You Are A Person. No! They Have To Look At A Little Photograph Of You. Then They Believe You Exist.

Some Cities Have Fallen Into Ruin And Some Are Built Upon Ruins But Others Contain Their Own Ruins While Still Growing.

It Took Courage To Let Things Fall Apart So Beautifully.

It's Amazing What You Can Get Used To.

It Was Possible To Feel Superior To Other People And Feel Like A Misfit At The Same Time.

It Was As If, Before She`d Met Him, Her Blood Had Circulated Grayly Around Her Body, And Now Ir Was All Oxygenated And Red. She Was Petrified Of Becoming The Half-alive Person She`d Been Before.

All Sixteen Mentioned Her Jutting Ribs, The Insubstantiality Of Her Thighs, And One, Who Went Up To The Roof With Lux During A Warm Winter Rain, Told Us How The Basins Of Her Collarbones Collected Water.

Is There Anything As Incredible As The Love Story Of Your Own Parents? Anything As Hard To Grasp As The Fact That Those Two Over-the-hill Players, Permanently On The Disabled List, Were Once In The Starting Lineup? It's Impossible To Imagine My Father, Who In My Experience Was Aroused Mainly By The Lowering Of Interest Rates, Suffering The Acute, Adolescent Passions Of The Flesh.

I Think There's A Real Connection Between Acting And Writing Novels Because The Way I Write Characters Has A Little Bit To Do With The Method Acting That I Was Taught In High School And College.

It Was Morning By The Clock But Deepest Nighttime In His Body.

I Have A Very Beautiful Room In My House... It's Glass On Three Sides, And You'd Think That's The Perfect Place To Write. Somehow In That Nice Room I Feel Too Exposed, And... I'm Too Distracted By Things Going On, So I End Up Writing In A Not-very-nice Office Bedroom.

Added To Their Loveliness Was A New Mysterious Suffering, Perfectly Silent, Visible In The Blue Puffiness Beneath Their Eyes Or The Way They Would Sometimes Stop In Mid-stride, Look Down, And Shake Their Heads As Though Disagreeing With Life.

Novelists Are Always Resisting Autobiographical Readings Of Their Work, Because They Know How False Those Can Be.

Lux Spent The Ride Dialing The Radio For Her Favorite Song. "it Makes Me Crazy," She Said. "you Know They're Playing It Somewhere, But You Have To Find It.

Some Pulitzer Winners - Novelists - Have Confided To Me That Getting The Prize Screwed Them Up. It Messed With Their Heads. That Hasn't Been My Experience.

What Lingered After Them Was Not Life, Which Always Overcomes Natural Death, But The Most Trivial List Of Mundane Facts: A Clock Ticking On A Wall, A Room Dim At Noon, And The Outrageousness Of A Human Being Thinking Only Of Herself.

College Wasn't Like The Real World. In The Real World People Dropped Names Based On Their Renown. In College, People Dropped Names Based On Their Obscurity.

We're All Made Up Of Many Parts, Other Halves. Not Just Me.

I'm The Final Clause In A Periodic Sentence, And That Sentence Begins A Long Time Ago, In Another Language, And You To Read It From The Beginning To Get To The End, Which Is My Arrival.

Three Times A Day Petrovich Showed Up At The Nurse's Office For His Injections, Always Using The Hypodermic Needle Himself Like The Most Craven Of Junkies, Though After Shooting Up He Would Play The Concert Piano In The Auditorium With Astounding Artistry, As Though Insulin Were The Elixir Of Genius.

But That Was In The Days When They Expected Perils To Come From Without, And Nothing Made Less Sense By That Time Than A Survival Room Buried In A House Itself Becoming One Big Coffin.

What If You Had Faith And Performed Good Works, What If You Died And Went To Heaven, And What If All The People You Met There Were People You Didn't Like?

Where Else Would She Feel More Comfortable Than In This Subterranean Realm Where People Wrote Down What They Couldn't Say, Where They Gave Voice To Their Most Shameful Longings And Knowledge?

Pregnancy Humbles Husbands. After An Initial Rush Of Male Pride They Quickly Recognise The Minor Role That Nature Had Assigned Them In The Drama Of Reproduction.

Dieting Fooled You Into Thinking You Could Control Your Life.

The Television Replaced The Sound Of Conversation That Was Missing From My Grandparents' Lives.

There Comes A Moment, When You Get Lost In The Woods, When The Woods Begin To Feel Like Home.

Regret, Already Sogging Me Down, Burst Its Dam. It Seeped Into My Legs, It Pooled In My Heart.

She May Have Looked Normal On The Outside, But Once You'd Seen Her Handwriting You Knew She Was Deliciously Complicated Inside.

But What Humans Forget, Cells Remember. The Body, That Elephant

He Had The Feeling That There Was Something Physically Behind His Eyes, Blocking The Light.

And In Some Of The Houses, People Were Getting Old And Sick And Were Dying, Leaving Others To Grieve. It Was Happening All The Time, Unnoticed, And It Was The Thing That Really Mattered. What Really Mattered In Life, What Gave It Weight, Was Death.

When I'm Creating A Character, It's A Little Bit Like What My Theater Teachers Used To Tell Me About Stanislavsky, Like If You're Using Sense Memory To Do A Scene - If You Have To Cry In A Scene, You Try To Remember Something In Your Life That Made You Cry And You Use That In Order To Get The Tears.

Their Desire Was Silent Yet Magnificent, Like A Thousand Daisies Attuning Their Faces Toward The Path Of The Sun.

I Live My Own Life And Nurse My Own Wounds. It's Not The Best Way To Live. But It's The Way I Am.

You Went Out With A Girl At First Because The Sheer Sight Of Her Made You Weak In The Knees. You Fell In Love And Were Desperate Not To Let Her Get Away. And Yet The More You Thought About Her, The Less You Knew Who She Was. The Hope Was That Love Transcended All Differences. That Was The Hope.

To Start With, Look At All The Books.

I Remember Liking To Write Stories Pretty Early On. In Fourth Or Fifth Grade, They Would Give Us The Beginning Of A Story, And We Were Supposed To Finish It. I Remember Liking That. But I Didn't Think About Deciding To Become A Writer Until High School At About The Age Of 16.

You Never Get Over It, But You Get To Where It Doesn't Bother You So Much.

There Are Some Books That Reached Through The Noise Of Life To Grab You By The Collar And Speak Only Of The Truest Things.

On The Morning The Last Lisbon Daughter Took Her Turn At Suicide- It Was Mary This Time, And Sleeping Pills, Like Therese- The Two Paramedics Arrived At The House Knowing Exactly Where The Knife Drawer Was, And The Gas Oven, And The Beam In The Basement From Which It Was Possible To Tie A Rope.

In The End, It Wasn't Death That Surprised Her But The Stubbornness Of Life.

Normality Wasn't Normal. It Couldn't Be. If Normality Were Normal, Everybody Could Leave It Alone. They Could Sit Back And Let Normality Manifest Itself.

The Pulitzer Prize Is An Idea; It's A Vote Of Confidence. Like Literature, It Exists Purely In The Mind.

I Saw The Movie, He Said. I Know What It's About. Listen To This. When Girls Get To Be About Twelve Or So - He Leaned Toward Us - Their Tits Bleed.

Every Letter Was A Love Letter. Of Course, As Love Letters Went, This One Could Have Been Better. It Was Not Very Promising, For Instance, That Madeleine Claimed Not To Want To See Him For The Next Half-century.

She Was A Large, Disordered Woman, Like A Child's Drawing That Didn't Stay Within The Lines.

There Is A Small Window Of Opportunity For Freckled Girls To Tan.

Well, Marriage Doesn't Function In The Way It Used To In Terms Of Deciding Our Fate, But It's In Our Heads, And It Determines A Lot Of Our Actions. Like, Right Now, If You Think About Gay Marriage - And They Just Started Having The First Gay Marriages In New York - It Shows What A Potent Idea Marriage Remains For People.

We Knew The Pain Of Winter Rushing Up Your Skirt, And The Ache Of Keeping Your Knees Together In Class, And How Drab And Infuriating It Was To Jump Rope While The Boys Played Baseball. We Could Never Understand Why The Girls Cared So Much About Being Mature, Or Why They Felt Compelled To Compliment Each Other.

I Was Beginning To Understand Something About Normality. Normality Wasn't Normal. It Couldn't Be. If Normality Were Normal, Everybody Could Leave It Alone. They Could Sit Back And Let Normality Manifest Itself. But People-and Especially Doctors- Had Doubts About Normality. They Weren't Sure Normality Was Up The Job. And So They Felt Inclined To Give It A Boost.

She Had Given Birth To Me And Nursed Me And Brought Me Up. She Had Known Me Before I Knew Myself And Now She Had No Say In The Matter. Life Started Out One Thing And Then Suddenly Turned A Corner And Became Something Else.

Depression Is Like A Bruise That Never Goes Away. A Bruise In Your Mind. You Just Got To Be Careful Not To Touch It Where It Hurts. It's Always There, Though.

He Knew A Lot About His Grandparents - And Perhaps He Feels He's Been Endowed With Abilities To Go Into People's Heads Who Are Long Dead - But, To A Certain Extent, He's Making It Up.

It Was Amazing How It Worked: The Tiniest Bit Of Truth Made Credible The Greatest Lies.

I'm Not Really An Autobiographical Writer, Though I Use Lots Of Stuff From My Life To Make My Stories Seem Real. But When I Actually Write About Myself, I Get Very Confused.

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Chazz Palminteri

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