Quotes from Lydia Davis

So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

The word "fine" is the greatest abbreviation and obviously wrong.

The Outing An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.

Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean.

Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion - you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

But at other times, I sit here reading in the afternoon, a myrtle in my buttonhole, and there are such beautiful passages in the book that I think I have become beautiful myself.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

She was thinking how it was the unfinished business. This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over. Everything was still going on. The business not only not finished but maybe not done well enough.

it occurs to me that I must not know altogether what I am, either, and that others know certain things about me better than I do, though I think I ought to know all there is to know and I proceed as if I do. Even once I see this, however, I have no choice but to continue to proceed as if I know altogether what I am, though I may also try to guess, from time to time, just what it is that others know that I do not know.

I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly. Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child.

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.

Idea For A Short Documentary Film Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over.

She found it an interesting exercise to explore a place with a person she did not know well, following not only her own impulses but also his.

We know we are very special," Davis writes in "Special": "Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?" (from James Wood's review of the FSG "Collected Stories of Lydia Davis")