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I knit so that I don’t unravel. I think a lot of people would say this too.
“Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian’s page.”
― The Significance of the Frontier in American History
― The Significance of the Frontier in American History
“Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.”
― The Age of Innocence
― The Age of Innocence
“But there was a painful continuity between believing in my friend's marriage and deciding to end my own. Both convictions were born of a stubborn faith in what marriage could be.”
― Splinters
― Splinters
“How many times since her birth had I thought, I'd kill to be alone. How many times since the separation had I thought, I can't stand to be without her. How many times, across the course of my life, had I wanted contradictory things from the universe and then convinced myself I could solve the contradiction by naming it?”
― Splinters
― Splinters
“During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I'd wanted her to say, Don't be crazy! You won't cause any harm! Or at least, You're in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm! But she hadn't said either of these things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it's necessary.”
― Splinters
― Splinters
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