Alice Steinbach Quotes

It used to surprise me, the intensity with which I still remembered these distant memories. But when I entered my fifties ... I understood their enduring clarity ... In the end, what adds up to a life is nothing more than the accumulation of small daily moments.

I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.

As promised, Kyoto Station turned out to be an ordeal. For ninety minutes I searched for a way out of the sixteen-story train station,

In many ways I was an independent woman. For years I'd made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow.

I had surprised myself this year by jumping in to reshape my life before life stepped in to reshape it for me.

Women, I learned, adapted.
At first..they seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. Then I realized it was this flexibility that enabled them to survive ... that sooner or later, by choice or by chance, most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence; in darker moods, as survival. Either way women had to do it.

The fun-seekers, I noted, were spontaneous and flexible. They approached each day and each situation with a willingness to ride whatever wave came along, just for the experience of it. The complainers, on the other hand, would only catch a wave if it was exactly to their liking. Anything else drew loud protestations about how it was not what they expected.

A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

But it was difficult, this living in real time only, and not diluting it by looking back or skipping forward. No wonder it's never really caught on with most people, I thought. It's just too hard.

Never give up the search to have back what was lost too soon.

What is the one emotion that you would like to feel for the rest of your life?

What if more of life could be like that? Like the last slow dance, where, to echo T.S. Eliot, a lifetime burns in every moment.

functioned - I realized that first impressions about hotel rooms are like first loves: neither is based on the concept of how, over time, one can come to appreciate the pleasures of durability over infatuation.

Being a student meant always looking up to someone wiser and always measuring yourself against that wisdom and knowledge.

Mother loved the wind. When I was growing up, she would recite this poem to me. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I, But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by. So it is with God.

How to stop rushing from place to place, always looking ahead to the next thing while the moment in front of me slipped away unnoticed.

Most of the time I liked being in charge of my life, thrived on it, in fact. But occasionally, when I was tired or unhappy. I'd find myself thinking how nice it would be to let someone else run the show, at least for a while.

I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.

And who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?

It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.

..., looking at the silent buildings, each one with a story to tell.

Except for the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in continuous, undefined mass.

Maybe it was I who needed to learn how to be quiet instead of cluttering the moment with too many words.

I had forgotten how wonderful it is to stand on a bridge and catch the scent of rain in the air. I had forgotten how much I need to be a part of water, wind, sky.

Sometimes it was hard for me to connect the boy I knew - the skinny smart kid who collected lead soldiers and pursued Boy Scout merit badges - with the phenomenally successful man he'd become. But sooner or later, when we were together, some remark would inevitably trigger childhood memories and then we'd be off, zipping down a path that existed now only for the two of us.

A scene," Mary told us, "is a moment when there is some form of tension. A scene leads to the next scene. And a causal connection between scenes is what leads you to the story. A scene should be very clearly developed, and when the action is finished, the scene is over. An anecdote is, 'Oh, I missed the train. You'll never believe what happened ... ' An anecdote leads to nothing.

Freedom has its dangers as well as its joys. And the sooner we learn to get up after a fall, the better off we'll be.

After all, the word "travel" comes from the Latin "trepalium." Which, loosely translated, means "instrument of torture.

His presence made me feel self-concious: of my appearance, of the way I was sitting, of my movements and gestures ... It was the behavior of a woman reacting to a man who attracts her.

And like any group thrown together in a strange situation, we developed the sort of we're-in-this-together, for-better-or-for-worse camaraderie that I found appealingly familiar. It was something I missed, the sense of sharing those small, daily experiences that, as far as I can tell, are really what life boils down to.