Quotes from Lydia Davis

But near the end of the hour I was also telling him how face-to-face with another person I couldn't speak. There was always a wall.

In fact, I liked teaching because I liked telling other people what to do. In those days it seemed clearer to me than it does now that if I did something a certain way, it had to be right for other people, too. I was so convinced of it that my students were convinced, too.

This woman had a loving heart and a capacity to understand another fallible human being.

The people of the town, though, remained strangers: I could not realize that I must be seeing some of them over and over again, it was as though each passed through only once, as though there were always new strangers coming here

The people of the town, though, remained strangers: I could not realize that I must be seeing some of them over and over again, it was as though each passed through only once, as though there were always new strangers coming here. And I felt so much a stranger myself that when, as rarely happened, I crossed the path of someone who knew me, and who spoke to me, I was startled and could hardly answer.

After that night, which was in late December, I was completely worn out. I did not walk as often, and when I walked did not see what was around me: though I looked up at the housefronts, at the sky, again and again I found myself watching the pavement that rolled out under my feet.

She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight parts of Buddha's eightfold path and thinks she might follow it. She sees that it mainly involves doing everything right.

But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it. So I still act as though my feelings were the center of everything, and they still cause me to end up alone by the living-room window late at night.

It is not what you want to be doing. It is that you are passing the time. You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep.

For one thing, it is hard for me to let a sentence stand if I see something wrong with it. Even when I'm writing a grocery list it is hard for me not to correct a misspelling.

I will tell him something one of the characters said and I can see he is ready to laugh even before I tell it, though so often, in the case of other subjects, he is not terribly interested in what I say to him, especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic.

I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often.

It should be so simple. You do what you can while he is awake, and then once he is asleep, you do what you can only when he is asleep, beginning with the most important thing. But it is not so simple.

In a simple way, that same night, like two hungry and thirsty people, we could decide we wanted to find a place to be alone together and remain together long enough to satisfy our appetite.

Maybe he also felt angry or insulted, if it occurred to him then or later that maybe he hadn't made a mistake but that I had deliberately stood him up, and not the way I did it — alone up there in the apartment, uncomfortable and embarrassed, chickening out, hiding out — but, he would imagine, in collusion with someone else, a girlfriend or boyfriend, confiding in them, snickering over him.

He takes me up a few flights of stairs into an small apartment. It looks familiar to me. Any room can seem like a room remembered from a dream, as can any doorway into a second room...

So what I think at this point is that I'm aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

alcoholic if necessary

Order is very important, order in a list of any kind. You may have the elements you want in a list, within a sentence, but in an order that is arbitrary or a bit jumbled. The reader receives the content that you have offered, but doesn't receive it in the best possible order, in an order that falls neatly into place in his or her mind: click, click, click.

He does not trust her: she will claim to be in a bad mood when she is not, and then require him to be kind to her.

Can't you agree with me about anything?" asks the Grouch. Old Mother has to admit it: she almost always disagrees with him. Even if she agrees with most of what he is saying, there will be some small part of it she disagrees with. When she does agree with him, she suspects her own motives: she may agree with him only so that at some future time she will be able to remind him that she does sometimes agree with him.

If I am playing a board game with people close to me and we are happy, I must be sure we don't quarrel before the end of it. I must be sure that at some later time we don't play another board game that is unhappy. I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often. I should add them up, now and then: what are my happy memories so far?

She, always dressed in gray, gentle yet stern, childlike yet mature, sweet yet uncompromising . . . the woman from Poland.

For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone would build a whole city when all that was needed was a room for her.