Home > Work > Why I Don't Write
1 " You think you are done with an experience once it is over and it is set into some version in a story. And there it will sit. But if you return to the experience many years later, because you are, say, urged by a movement in the culture to re-examine the treatment of women, an examination which seems to come every fifty years or so before it fades away again, then go, you might discover new details waiting for you, unnoticed. "
― Susan Minot , Why I Don't Write
2 " Later she would learn that a mistrust of one's senses was a normal reaction to situations like this. Though the body is alerted and absolutely certain about what is happening, the brain might try to find a way to reason out of it. Was there a word for disbelief in one's own sense. "
3 " When she'd heard the news on the phone it had torn a hole in her and she went immediately hard and did not cry. If she let herself feel, the part of her that was left would be riddled wigth holes and there'd be nothing left. She had not, since then, shed a tear. Her body shut down; to allow feeling would sink her "
4 " So she attended classes which were throughly altered now, as. if a water wash had brushed over everything, streaking lines, and pulling the color out. Grief turned out to be slow moving. Situations which at another time would be anxious-making were far less so now. What did anything matter? What could possibly be worrisome. She would therefore, have been less nervous than usual to walk with Mr. Tower to his car. "
