Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 133 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark. He could swear that when he took her to the theatre and she sat back in the dark loges in her evening dress, her skin was as luminous as the finest of sea shells, with a pale pink glow to it. And he wanted these flowers for her to wear in her hair. Mathilde did not have them. But as soon as the man left she went to look at herself in the mirror. This was the kind of feeling she wanted to inspire. Could she? Her glow was not of that nature. She was much more like fire than light. Her eyes were ardent, violet in color. Her hair was dyed blond but it shed a copper shadow around her. Her skin was copper-toned, too, firm and not at all transparent. Her body filled her dresses tightly, richly. She did not wear a corset, but her body had the shape of the women who did. She arched so as to throw the breasts forward and the buttocks high. The man had come back. But this time he was not asking for anything to buy. He stood looking at her, his long finely carved face smiling, his elegant gestures making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette, and said, “This time I came back just to see you.” Mathilde’s heart beat so swiftly that she felt as if this were the moment she had expected for years. She almost stood up on her toes to hear the rest of his words. She felt as if she were the luminous woman sitting back in the dark box receiving the unusual flowers. But what the polished gray-haired writer said in his aristocratic voice was, “As soon as I saw you, I was stiff in my pants.” The crudity of the words was like an insult. She reddened and struck at him. This scene was repeated on several occasions. Mathilde found that when she appeared, men were usually speechless, deprived of all inclination for romantic courtship. Such words as these fell from them each time at the mere sight of her. Her effect was so direct that all they could express was their physical disturbance. Instead of accepting this as a tribute, she resented it. Now she was in the cabin of the smooth Spaniard, Dalvedo. Dalvedo was peeling some cactus figs for her, and talking. Mathilde was regaining confidence. She sat on the arm of a chair in her red velvet evening dress.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Lori was the most obsessive reader. Fantasy and science fiction dazzled her, especially The Lord of the Rings . When she wasn’t reading, she was drawing orcs or hobbits. She tried to get everyone in the family to read the books. “They transport you to a different world,” she’d say. I didn’t want to be transported to another world. My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships. I loved The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and especially A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . I thought Francie Nolan and I were practically identical, except that she had lived fifty years earlier in Brooklyn and her mother always kept the house clean. Francie Nolan’s father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shiftless drunk, maybe I wasn’t a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder. • • • One night that summer, when I was lying in bed and everyone else was asleep, I heard the front door open and the sound of someone muttering and stumbling around in the darkness. Dad had come home. I went into the living room, where he was sitting at the drafting table. I could see by the moonlight coming through the window that his face and hair were matted with blood. I asked him what had happened. “I got in a fight with a mountain,” he said, “and the mountain won.” I looked at Mom asleep on the sofa bed, her head buried under a pillow. She was a deep sleeper and hadn’t stirred. When I lit the kerosene lamp, I saw that Dad also had a big gash in his right forearm and a cut on his head so deep that I could see the white of his skull. I got a toothpick and tweezers and picked the rocky grit out of the gash. Dad didn’t wince when I poured rubbing alcohol on the wound. Because of all his hair, I had no way to put on a bandage, and I told Dad I should shave the area around the cut. “Hell, honey, that would ruin my image,” he said. “A fellow in my position’s got to look presentable.” Dad studied the gash on his forearm. He tightened a tourniquet around his upper arm and told me to fetch Mom’s sewing box. He fumbled around in it for silk thread but, unable to find any, decided that cotton would be fine. He threaded a needle with black thread, handed it to me, and pointed at the gash. “Sew it up,” he said. “Dad! I can’t do that.” “Oh, go ahead, honey,” he said. “I’d do it myself, except I can’t do diddly with my left hand.” He smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’m so thoroughly pickled, I won’t feel a thing.” Dad lit a cigarette and placed his arm on the table. “Go ahead,” he said.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Their self-esteem would flourish; all self-doubt would be erased like a typo. Entire paragraphs and manuscripts of disappointment and rejection and lack of faith would be wiped out by one push of a psychic delete button and replaced by a quiet, tender sense of worth and belonging. Then they could wrap the world in flame. But this is not exactly what happens. Or at any rate, this is not what it has been like for me. For me, it has been more like a cross between the last few weeks of pregnancy, when you look and feel like Orson Welles and you are hormonally challenged up the yang, your ankles are swollen and you feel revulsion at the smell of vegetables cooking; and the first day of seventh-grade PE class, when they make you line up by size before they hand out your gym uniform. And you’re either four feet tall, like E.T., or made to feel like Diane Arbus’s Jewish giant. Oh, the process starts off well enough. One day several months before your pub date, you get a set of bound galleys, which is to say, a paperbound book with your manuscript set in type. I always feel a desperate sense of relief at this point, because it seems like the publisher is too far in now to cancel publication. These bound galleys have also gone out to hundreds of papers and reviewers, and this makes you believe that the publisher has already shelled out so much money in production and postage costs that they will have to go ahead and actually publish the damn thing. The first time you read through your galleys is heaven. The second time through, all you see are the typos no one caught. It looks like the typesetter typed it with frostbitten feet, drunk. And the typos are important ones. They make you look ignorant; they make you look like an ignorant racist. By the third or fourth time through, you can see that there is not one fresh or insightful or even salvageable line in the whole thing. By the fifth reading, you are no longer sure that publishing this would be in your best interests. Not long after, you get your early reviews, in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews , and sometimes they sound like your mother wrote them. Other times they suggest that you are a show-offy vacuous loser, and they hope you die so that they won’t have to read your work anymore. I have gotten prepub reviews that said I was a treadmark on the underpants of life. Perhaps this is not exactly what they said, but by reading between the lines, I could see that this is what they were implying. You survive that. Possibly you’re still drinking, so you have a pitcher of martinis just to take the edge off, or you’ve quit drinking, so you eat your body weight in pastries and Mexican food.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  This is not verbatim. I was a little edgy for the next six weeks, as you can imagine. I had lots and lots of drinks every night, and told lots of strangers at the bar about how my dad had died and I’d written this book about it, and how the early reviewers had criticized it, and then I’d start to cry and need a few more drinks, and then I’d end up telling them about this great dog we’d had named Llewelyn who had to be put to sleep when I was twelve, which still made me so sad even to think about, I’d tell my audience, that it was all I could do not to go into the rest room and blow my brains out. Then the book came out. I got some terrific reviews in important places, and a few bad ones. There were a few book-signing parties, a few interviews, and a number of important people claimed to love it. But overall it seemed that I was not in fact going to be taking early retirement. I had secretly believed that trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity. And this is what I thought when my second book came out, and my third, and my fourth, and my fifth. And each time I was wrong. But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Although he was of gentle birth, well mannered and well groomed, he happened to see a low-born kite sailing by. On that instant the sweet gentleman became infatuated with a scavenger bird. Can you believe it? Of course he forgot all about his love for me. He broke all his oaths and promises. So my so-called lover has fallen for a kite. And I am left behind without hope!’ At that the falcon let out a scream, and fainted dead away in the lap of Canacee. The princess and her entourage were greatly moved by the falcon’s plight, but they did not know how to comfort her. Canacee decided to take the bird home, cradling her in her lap, and then she began to wrap up the self-inflicted wounds with bandages and plasters. The princess also took rare herbs from the garden of the palace, making ointments and other medicines from them; she tried everything in her power to heal the hawk. She even made a pen of wickerwork by the side of her bed, draped in blue velvet cloths, where the bird might rest. Blue, of course, is the colour of faithfulness. The outside of this cage was painted green, and on it were depicted the images of all the false birds of the world - the owls, the tercelets, the lecherous sparrows. There were also placed here, in derision, the portraits of those little chatterers known as magpies. How they scold and chide! So I will leave Canacee in the company of her ailing hawk. I will say no more about her magic ring until a later occasion, when I will tell you how the poor bird regained her repentant lover. The old books relate how this reunion was accomplished by the son of Genghis Khan, Cambalus. I think I have mentioned him before. Anyway, he was the one who brought the birds together. Enough of that. I now want to proceed to tales of battle and adventure. I have many marvels to impart to you. I will tell you the history of Genghis Khan, the great conqueror. Then I will speak of Algarsif, the oldest son of the mighty warrior, who won his wife by magical means. He would have been in great danger, if he had not been saved by that wondrous horse of brass. Then I will narrate the adventures of another warrior who fought the two brothers for the hand of their sister, Canacee. There is so much to tell you! I will begin again where I left off. PART THREE

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn’t want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished. That was the word Dad used. “You did wrong,” he said, “and now we’ve all been banished.” “This isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden,” Lori said. I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing us. “Why don’t we just move back to Phoenix?” I asked Mom. “We’ve already been there,” she said. “And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don’t even know about.” She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. “It’s not exactly palatial, so there’s going to be a lot of togetherness,” Mom said. “And it’s on the rustic side.” “How rustic?” Lori asked. Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. “It doesn’t have indoor plumbing,” she said. • • • Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Olds—our budget was in the high two figures—so that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt. The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  When someone reliable gives you this kind of feedback, you now have some true sense of your work’s effect on people, and you may now know how to approach your final draft. If you are getting ready to send your work to a potential agent for the first time, you don’t want to risk burning that bridge by sending something that’s just not ready. You really must get your piece or book just right, as right as you can. Sometimes it is just a matter of fine-tuning, or maybe one whole character needs to be rethought. Sometimes the friend will love the feel of the writing, the raw material, and yet feel that it is a million miles from being done. This can be deeply disappointing, but again, better that your spouse or friend tell you this than an agent or an editor. I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture and that everything needs just a little cleaning—and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch. This is exactly what it can be like to give, say, a novel to someone else to read. This person can love it and still find it a total mess, in need of a great deal of work, of even a new foundation. So how do I find one of these partners? my students ask. The same way you find a number of people for a writing group. The only difference is that in this case, you’re looking for one partner instead of several. So if you are in a class, look around, see if there’s someone whose work you’ve admired, who seems to be at about the same level as you. Then you can ask him or her if he or she wants to meet for a cup of coffee and see if you can work with each other. It’s like asking for a date, so while you are doing this, you will probably be rolfed by all your most heinous memories of seventh and eighth grade. If the person says no, it’s good to wait until you get inside your car before you fall apart completely. Then you can rend your clothes and keen and do a primal scream. Of course, you probably want to be sure that the person hasn’t followed you out to your car.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk. The banana peel has appeared almost every time I’ve scored a triumph, or what the world would regard as a triumph. It’s God as coyote prankster. Just last week, for instance, I was participating in this illustrious literary event in San Francisco for a national charity. I had waited for years to be included in this event, each year watching six other writers be selected. I had tried to be a good sport about it, God knows I had. I understood that the organizers needed to invite big-time, nationally known writers so as to draw the biggest possible crowd; this made perfect sense. But year after year I felt dejected each time I was not included. Finally this year I was asked, and my joy was boundless. Now, I’m not stupid: I knew it was a nice big plate of cocaine for my ego. I knew it was another golden calf. But still my baby heart soared like an eagle. However. There was this one tiny little problem. I was the last author to be asked and to commit, so I wasn’t on the initial press release that went out three months ago. The publicity chairwoman sent out a second release after I came on board. But when the first big prominent mention was made in the paper a few weeks ago, my name wasn’t included. I was miffed, since it was the most important column in the paper, but I am old and tough and can handle this sort of disappointment. Next there was a paragraph about the event in the book section, and once again I was not included. This time the publicity chairwoman called, upset and so full of apologies that she managed to mollify me. Then there was a big mention in the society pages, and guess what? It felt like seventh grade all over again. The publicity chairwoman called again and was so upset that I thought she might actually drink a big glass of Drano right there on the phone. I felt suddenly so teary and premenstrual and left out that I couldn’t even talk about it. Hours later, I remembered that if I wasn’t enough before being asked to participate in this prestigious event, then participating wasn’t going to make me enough. Being enough was going to have to be an inside job. Also, about an hour after I had slogged through to this conclusion, my mouth dropped open. I had somehow forgotten that it was a charity event!

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Somehow you get the time to pass, and then your pub date arrives. There is something mythic about the date of publication, and you actually come to believe that on this one particular morning you will wake up to a phone ringing off the hook and your publisher will be so excited that they will have hired the Blue Angels precision flying team to buzz your squalid little hovel, which you will be moving out of as soon as sales of the book really take off. Or at least they will remember to send flowers. I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day. We talked about it all summer. We each pretended to have modest expectations. I had modest expectations for his book; he had modest expectations for mine. The week before, we talked almost every morning about how excited we were and what a long time we had waited, and how it was just like being a little kid waiting for Christmas Eve. Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming. I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt, and called Pammy and a few friends to let them congratulate me. Then I waited for the phone to ring. The phone did not know its part. It sat there silent as death with a head cold. By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves. Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day. I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring. Finally, finally it rang at four. I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we both had to be sedated. He sent me flowers, and before I knew he had done so, I sent him flowers, too. The ones he sent me were so beautiful, roses and irises mostly. That is often pretty much what it is like, except for the part about the roses and irises. I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy. If you are lucky, you will get a few reviews, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Don’t even get me started on the places where one is neglected.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Abby didn’t miss that either. Sweetie, who’d been resting under the table, began to bark and when Daniel kneeled down to pet her she growled at him. “Jesus ... what kind of dog is this anyway?” Daniel asked, jumping out of the way. “A lab,” Lamb said. “She’s usually very friendly.” He opened the door and shooed Sweetie outside. “Well ...” Abby said, trying to be positive. “This house has a lot of ... possibilities.” They went on an island tour, all six of them crammed into the Volvo, the two boys in the back seat, one staring out the left window, one staring out the right, and Caitlin and Vix on the floor in the way-back with Sweetie. Lamb opened the rear window so they wouldn’t suffocate. In the front, Abby and Lamb were just la-ti-da, as if this were even better than the Brady Bunch. While they were gone the cleaning service would be trying to whip the house into shape. They’d told Lamb it would take all day, maybe two days. Lamb promised a bonus if they finished in one. They didn’t visit Trisha’s boat this time, or go to the nude beach. Instead of clam dogs and french fries, lunch was a dreary affair at a harborside restaurant, with Daniel sulking and Sharkey’s inner motor running on high. Caitlin moved her food around on her plate but didn’t eat a bite. Vix tried her best, pretending to be fascinated by The Story of Abby and Lamb, and how they’d met and how they’d instantly been attracted and blah blah blah ... who cared? “He couldn’t believe I was a student at The B-School,” Abby said, laughing. “Still can’t,” Lamb added, nuzzling her. Vix didn’t have a clue what The B-School was but it didn’t matter. Nobody noticed. “I came to Boston after the divorce, after living my entire life in Chicago,” Abby said. “I’d hoped Daniel would come, but you know how it is, he didn’t want to leave his friends or his school.” She tried to tousle Daniel’s hair but he pulled away angrily. “So, for now, Daniel’s living with his dad.” Vix kept nodding, the way reporters do on TV when they’re conducting an interview, to prove they’re really listening. “And when I get my MBA, next summer,” Abby continued, “I’ll decide whether to go back to Chicago or look for a job in the East.” She smiled at Lamb, a private kind of smile. Vix wondered if she knew about Trisha.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Más tarde esa noche, me recuesto en el sofá con el brazo metido detrás de la cabeza y una cerveza en la mano, mirando la televisión. He estado en un lúcido aturdimiento desde hace un rato, mientras un programa se ha convertido en cinco. Dejo mi cerveza y levanto el control remoto, finalmente apagando el HGTV y parpadeando, creo que por primera vez en tres horas. —Tiene razón —murmuro—. Están malditamente obsesionados con la placa para salpicaduras. En un momento de curiosidad, había sintonizado el canal después de llegar a casa de Home Depot y es como si me hubiera desmayado después de eso, solo despertando momentáneamente para hacer un sándwich e intentar hablar con Cole. Sin embargo, ahora salió de nuevo, dándose una ducha rápida y saliendo rápidamente después de llegar a casa del trabajo y darse cuenta que Jordan no estaba aquí. Pensé que podríamos ir a cenar tarde o algo así, pero al parecer, sus planes no se podían cancelar de nuevo. O tiene miedo de estar a solas conmigo. No es como si quisiera pelear, tampoco. Incluso simplemente ver juntos un programa en la televisión estaría bien. Quiero decir, hemos logrado no matarnos el uno al otro en el pasado. Solía caerle bien. ¿Y de dónde saca todo este dinero para salir de fiesta? Tiene que estarse gastando todo lo que está ganando. No es que tenga prisa por hacer que ahorre dinero y se vaya, pero creo que ahora puedo juzgarme tan duramente como juzgué a Jordan. Cuanto más haces por alguien, menos hacen por sí mismos. Soy tan culpable como ella. Cole no crecerá hasta que se vea obligado a hacerlo. Bebo el resto de mi cerveza y me pongo de pie, llevando la botella vacía a la cocina. Mi teléfono suena en mi bolsillo y lo saco. Dutch. —Hola —respondo, arrojando la botella a la basura. —Hola. Deberías venir a Grounders ahora mismo. ¿Eh? —Como en este momento —agrega antes que tenga la oportunidad de decir algo.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  When someone reliable gives you this kind of feedback, you now have some true sense of your work’s effect on people, and you may now know how to approach your final draft. If you are getting ready to send your work to a potential agent for the first time, you don’t want to risk burning that bridge by sending something that’s just not ready. You really must get your piece or book just right, as right as you can. Sometimes it is just a matter of fine-tuning, or maybe one whole character needs to be rethought. Sometimes the friend will love the feel of the writing, the raw material, and yet feel that it is a million miles from being done. This can be deeply disappointing, but again, better that your spouse or friend tell you this than an agent or an editor. I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture and that everything needs just a little cleaning—and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch. This is exactly what it can be like to give, say, a novel to someone else to read. This person can love it and still find it a total mess, in need of a great deal of work, of even a new foundation. So how do I find one of these partners? my students ask. The same way you find a number of people for a writing group. The only difference is that in this case, you’re looking for one partner instead of several. So if you are in a class, look around, see if there’s someone whose work you’ve admired, who seems to be at about the same level as you. Then you can ask him or her if he or she wants to meet for a cup of coffee and see if you can work with each other. It’s like asking for a date, so while you are doing this, you will probably be rolfed by all your most heinous memories of seventh and eighth grade. If the person says no, it’s good to wait until you get inside your car before you fall apart completely. Then you can rend your clothes and keen and do a primal scream. Of course, you probably want to be sure that the person hasn’t followed you out to your car.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  And for the life of me, I could not get her to tell me how much the land was worth. “I told you I don’t know,” she said. “Then tell me how many acres it is, and where exactly it is, and I’ll find out how much an acre of land is going for in that area.” I wasn’t interested in her money; I just wanted to know—needed to know—the answer to my question: How much was that freaking land worth? Maybe she truly didn’t know. Maybe she was afraid to find out. Maybe she was afraid of what we’d all think if we knew. But instead of answering me, she kept repeating that it was important to keep Uncle Jim’s land—land that had belonged to her father and his father and his father before that—in the family. “Mom, I can’t ask Eric for a million dollars.” “Jeannette, I haven’t asked you for a lot of favors, but I’m asking you for one now. I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important. But this is important.” I told Mom I didn’t think Eric would lend me a million dollars to buy some land in Texas, and even if he would, I wouldn’t borrow it from him. “It’s too much money,” I said. “What would I do with the land?” “Keep it in the family.” “I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” I said. “I’ve never even seen that land.” “Jeannette,” Mom said when she had accepted the fact that she would not get her way, “I’m deeply disappointed in you.” LORI WAS WORKING as a freelance artist specializing in fantasy, illustrating calendars and game boards and book jackets. Brian had joined the police force as soon as he turned twenty. Dad couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, raising a son who’d grown up to become a member of the gestapo. But I was so proud of my brother on the day he was sworn in, standing there in the ranks of the new officers, straight-shouldered in his navy blue uniform with its glittering brass buttons. Meanwhile, Maureen had graduated from high school and enrolled in one of the city colleges, but she never really applied herself and ended up living with Mom and Dad. She worked from time to time as a bartender or waitress, but the jobs never lasted long. Ever since she was a kid, she’d been looking for someone to take care of her. In Welch, the Pentecostal neighbors provided for her, and now in New York, with her long blond hair and wide blue eyes, she found various men who were willing to help out. The boyfriends never lasted any longer than the jobs. She talked about finishing college and going to law school, but distractions kept cropping up. The longer she stayed with Mom and Dad, the more lost she became, and after a while she was spending most of her days in the apartment, smoking cigarettes, reading novels, and occasionally painting nude self-portraits.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I stirred it as hard as I could and kept stirring even after I knew the paint was ruined, because I also knew that we’d never get more, and instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job—one that announced to the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked the gumption to get the work done. LITTLE HOBART STREET led up into one of those hollows so deep and narrow that people joked you had to pipe in the sunlight. The neighborhood did have lots of kids—Maureen had real friends for the first time—and we all tended to hang out at the National Guard armory at the foot of the hill. The boys played tackle football on the training field. Most of the girls my age spent their afternoons sitting on the brick wall surrounding the armory, combing their hair and touching up their lip gloss and pretending to get all indignant but secretly loving it if a crew-cut reservist wolf-whistled at them. One of the girls, Cindy Thompson, made a special effort to befriend me, but it turned out that what she really wanted was to recruit me for the junior Ku Klux Klan. Neither putting on makeup nor wearing a sheet had much appeal for me, so I played football with the boys, who would waive their guys-only rule and let me join a team if they were short a player. The better-off folk of Welch had not exactly flocked to our part of town. A few miners lived along the street, but most of the grown-ups didn’t work at all. Some of the moms had no husbands, and some of the dads had black lung. The rest were either too distracted by their troubles or just plain unmotivated, so pretty much everyone grudgingly accepted some form of public aid. Although we were the poorest family on Little Hobart Street, Mom and Dad never applied for welfare or food stamps, and they always refused charity. When teachers gave us bags of clothes from church drives, Mom made us take them back. “We can take care of our own,” Mom and Dad liked to say. “We don’t accept handouts from anyone.” If things got tight, Mom kept reminding us that some of the other kids on Little Hobart Street had it tougher than we did. The twelve Grady kids had no dad—he’d either died in a mine cave-in or run off with a whore, depending on whom you listened to—and their mom spent her days in bed suffering from migraines. As a result, the Grady boys ran completely wild. It was hard to tell them apart, because they all wore blue jeans and torn T-shirts and had their heads shaved bald to keep away lice.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) We look for peace in escape. But the trouble about escape is that it is always necessary to return. A. J. Gossip draws a picture of a woman whose home was a complete mess. She leaves her home one afternoon and goes to a cinema. For an hour or two, she escapes into the glamour and the luxury of the world of the film – and then she must go back home. It is escape all right – but there is the inevitable return. W. M. Macgregor tells of an old woman who lived in a terrible slum in Edinburgh called the Pans. Periodically, she would grow disgusted with the surroundings in which she lived and would make a tour of her friends, extracting a small sum of money from each. With the proceeds, she would get helplessly drunk. When others remonstrated with her, she would answer: ‘Do you grudge me my one chance to get out of the Pans with a sup of whisky?’ Again it was escape – but she, too, had to return. It is always possible to find some kind of peace by the route of escape, but it is never a lasting peace. The great eighteenth-century man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson used to insist that everyone should have a hobby, for he held that people should have as many retreats for their minds as possible. But even there, there is the necessity to return. Escape is not wrong; sometimes it is necessary if health and sanity are to be preserved; but it is always something that only alleviates pain and is never a cure. (2) There is the peace of evasion. Many people seek peace by refusing to face their problems: they push them to the back of their minds and seek to pull down the blind on them. There are two things to be said about that. The first is that no one ever solved a problem by refusing to face it. However much we evade it, it is still there. And problems are like diseases: the longer we refuse to take them seriously, the worse they get. We may well come to a stage when a disease is incurable and a problem insoluble. The second thing is maybe even more serious. Psychology tells us that there is a part of the mind which never stops thinking. With our conscious minds, we may be evading a problem; but our subconscious mind is teasing away at it. The thing is there like a piece of hidden shrapnel, a splinter of metal in the body; and it can ruin life. Far from bringing peace, evasion is most destructive of peace.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It often happens that we avoid teaching some elements because they are difficult; we defend ourselves by saying that our hearers would never grasp such ideas. It is one of the tragedies of the Church that there is so little attempt to teach new knowledge and new thinking. It is true that such teaching is difficult. It is true that it often means meeting the lethargy of the lazy mind and the defensive prejudice of the shut mind. But the task remains. The writer to the Hebrews did not seek to avoid the duty of bringing his message, even if it was difficult and the minds of his hearers were slow. He regarded it as his supreme responsibility to pass on the truth he knew. His complaint is that his hearers have been Christians for many years and are still babes no nearer maturity. The contrast between the immature Christian and the child, between milk and solid food, often occurs in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:2; 1 Corinthians 2:6, 3:2, 14:20; Ephesians 4:13ff.). Hebrews says that by now they should be teachers. It is not necessary to take that literally. To say that someone was able to teach was the Greek way of saying that that person had a mature grasp of a subject. The writer says that they still need someone to teach them the simple elements ( stoicheia ) of Christianity . This word has a variety of meanings. In grammar, it means the letters of the alphabet, the A B C; in physics, it means the four basic elements of which the world is composed; in geometry, it means the elements of proof, like the point and the straight line; in philosophy, it means the first elementary principles with which the students begin. It is the sorrow of the writer to the Hebrews that, after many years of Christianity, his people have never got past the basics; they are like children who do not know the difference between right and wrong. Here, he is face to face with a problem which confronts the Church in every generation – that of Christians who refuse to grow up . (1) Christians can refuse to grow up in knowledge. They can be guilty of failure to take the opportunities that broaden horizons and develop ideas. There are people who keep on saying that what was good enough for people in the past is good enough for them.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I bet he thinks he’s above that. Whenever I’m giving a lecture at a writing conference and happen to mention the benefits of finding someone to read your drafts, at least one older established writer comes up to me and says that he or she would never in a million years show his or her work to another person before it was done. It is not a good idea, and I must stop telling my students that it will help them. I just smile, geishalike, and make little fluttery sounds of understanding. Then I go on telling people to consider finding someone who would not mind reading their drafts and marking them up with useful suggestions. The person may not have an answer to what is missing or annoying about the piece, but writing is so often about making mistakes and feeling lost. There are probably a number of ways to tell your story right, and someone else may be able to tell you whether or not you’ve found one of these ways. I’m not suggesting that you and another writer sit in a cubby somewhere and write together, as though you were doing potato prints side by side at the institution, and that then you beam at each other’s work the way you gape when your kid first writes his name. But I am suggesting that there may be someone out there in the world—maybe a spouse, maybe a close friend—who will read your finished drafts and give you an honest critique, let you know what does and doesn’t work, give you some suggestions on things you might take out or things on which you need to elaborate, ways in which to make your piece stronger. In the first story of Donald Barthelme’s I ever read, twenty years ago, he said that truth is a hard apple to catch and it is a hard apple to throw. I know what a painful feeling it is when you’ve been working on something forever, and it feels done, and you give your story to someone you hope will validate this and that person tells you it still needs more work. You have to, at this point, question your assessment of this person’s character and, if he or she is not a spouse or a lifelong friend, decide whether or not you want them in your life at all.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  I am not my own master. My subjects beg me to choose another wife. They will not be denied. The pope himself has decreed that I can divorce you, to restrain their anger, and marry again. There is not much more to say to you. My new bride is already on her way here.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn’t want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished. That was the word Dad used. “You did wrong,” he said, “and now we’ve all been banished.” “This isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden,” Lori said. I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing us. “Why don’t we just move back to Phoenix?” I asked Mom. “We’ve already been there,” she said. “And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don’t even know about.” She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. “It’s not exactly palatial, so there’s going to be a lot of togetherness,” Mom said. “And it’s on the rustic side.” “How rustic?” Lori asked. Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. “It doesn’t have indoor plumbing,” she said. • • • Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Olds—our budget was in the high two figures—so that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt. The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Phoebe SHE HADN’T MEANT to take Vix by surprise. That look on her face. The way she’d dropped the melon. Gads! She was sure Vix would have known. After all, the two of them were inseparable, weren’t they? She couldn’t begin to guess what game Caity was playing this time. Not that Caity tells her anything. Never has. Not really. She’s missed that part of the mother-daughter relationship. She has the feeling Vix has, too. Ah well ... maybe they’ll do a better job with their daughters. The idea of Caity having a daughter makes her laugh, until she realizes that would make her a grandmother! Now there’s an experience she can do without for another ten years, at least. “I’M TRYING TO give my life meaning,” Caitlin said when Vix called. “Does that make any sense to you?” When Vix didn’t answer right away Caitlin added, “Why am I asking you? Your life has always had meaning.” “You sure you’re not confusing meaning with struggle?” “How do I know? Do you think by trying not to be ordinary I’ve become neurotic?” “Are you seeing a shrink ... is that what this is about?” “Of course I’m seeing a shrink. Do you know anyone who isn’t ... besides you?” “I can’t afford therapy.” “I’m sure Abby would help.” “Is that a jab?” “Does it feel like one?” “Yes.” After a long pause Vix said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”