Frederick Weisel Quotes

At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds.

Sometimes, however much you plan, however many precautions you take, something happens, and in a minute the world is changed. After that, you're the person on the other side of that minute.

The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn't bring ourselves to say.

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing - escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you'll find a compulsion to flee - a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores.
- Teller: A Novel

If they're together long enough, every couple has one conversation over and over. This was ours.

Nico's hair was combed straight up, stiff with mousse, the tips dyed the color of traffic cones.

There's an old adage: the sensation of drowning reminds you of everything you ever knew about swimming.

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.

The sun had already set behind the mountains, and the sky had been drained of color. The trellises of sauvignon blanc flowed down the hill in even rows toward the valley floor. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn't outside. As far as I could tell, the grapes were minding their own business.

But, whatever the magic, I wasn't smarter than chemistry, and after a while, I heard two people talking in the empty room next door, their whispers coming out of the phone jack.

Anita Kleinman was a slight woman in her seventies. Her hair was thinning and white with a touch of pink, and was swept back from her face in unbroken waves. She wore a full-length Chinese silk gown covered with bright gold dragons on a blue background. Her fingers were tipped with long red nails and heavy with gold rings. She held out her arms in an expression of welcome and perhaps to show me the full extent of her dragons.

What spares us is memory," he said. "It's what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That's why you're so important, Charlie. You're a guardian of our national memory.

I lived that year on top of a wooden tower in an area east of Santa Rosa known as the Valley of the Moon.

Aren't autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don't we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.