Quotes from Abigail Thomas

Well, now I know I can control my tongue, my temper, and my appetites, but that's it. I have no effect on weather, traffic, or luck. I can't make good things happen. I can't keep anybody safe. I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past. What a relief.

It's hard to sit on the floor and change your socks without looking as though you're sitting on the floor changing your socks

I breathe the night, go to bed with the rest of my pack, and wake up in the morning with a sawed-off past and a future I can't imagine.

Lots of people in my somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say than think.

He is wearing an old overcoat from the Salvation Army in Easton, Pennsylvania. It cost five bucks ten years ago, Louise remembers. Henry is not interested so much in the bargain, he wants ghosts in his clothes. He likes wondering what another man kept in those deep pockets. He writes poems about it.

If it isn't life and death, it isn't life and death.

The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me, I say to Catherine. Yes, Mom. she says, I know, Your memories are my memories now.

What is this longing, she will want to ask. This troubling feeling of more to come. You can make something out of it, I want to tell her. But that's what her life is for.

neurosis is for the young, who think they are made of time

I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don't feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young

There's nothing I want to relive—certainly not youth—and as for what's to come, I'm in no hurry. I

But I have to resist the impulse to create memories suitable for framing.

What if some man wanted to tell me how many feet from a dwelling a cesspool needed to be? What if he wanted to talk about the pros and cons of raising the mortgage rate? What if he wanted to talk about his childhood? Or worse, mine!

To have a fear you have to be able to imagine the future, and I never think about the future anymore. It is no longer my destination.

I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing.

Once I stood in line behind a young woman ordering coffee who remarked to her friend that she didn't yet have a set of beliefs, and I imagined catalogs from which one could order such sets, like furniture, beliefs that wouldn't collapse under one's full weight, big sturdy reliable sideboards of belief. As for me, I have learned what I can do and what I can't. I know my limits. That's all I have to go on, but it's better than nothing.

What I used to fear was growing old—not the aches and pains part or the what-have-I-done-with-my-life part or the threat of illness, none of that. I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without the option of looking good.

I appreciate not being interrupted in the middle of thinking about nothing.

the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.

It seems to me, he emailed me later, that you start out with what you know or what you think you know and you work within those 'truthful' boundaries until you reach some sort of wilderness of not knowing, and then you find a way through until you see an end, or you find a way through until you find the end that you've already seen. It can work either way: running away from the truth, or running out of it.

THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN WHO HAD ARRIVED AT the Northeast Center angry and belligerent, as inclined to take a swing at you as not. He began showing up in Bill's studio and started to paint. Bill watched him become an artist, and gradually he stopped being at the mercy of his rages. He got well enough to leave the center and move to a group home. This is what he said to Bill before he left: "What is art, anyway, except not pounding on walls.

But Outsider Art is its own context. I don't have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don't have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don't feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don't feel like an outsider—to fall in love I only need eyes.

I went and bought Guitar Towns by Steve Earle instead of listening to my better self...After a bit, and despite my new relationship with time, I began to experience impatience. One song at a time was taking too long. I began to wonder if there wasn't some way I could cram all this music in at once. Oh hell. That's called fucking.