Joyce Carol Oates

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.

How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray__ere? Is it possible that he won__ be coming home with me in another day or two, as we__ planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It__ like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed__o think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers__heir dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges__ut he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight_

She will speculate that she didn__ fully know her husband__his will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband __live_ in her memory__lusive, teasing.

The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.

How exhausted I am suddenly!__hough this has been Ray__ best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling__lmost__xhilarated.

It is the most horrific thought__y husband died among strangers.

Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad__ could not bear to __utlive_ them__or to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

Nor do I like being told upsetting news__nless there is a good reason. I can__ help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.

That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can__ confront it.

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely__erhaps never__urious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you__e ruined both our lives.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.