A Certain Bohemian, Good-witch Sort Of Charm

She Is Not A Writer At All, Really; She Is Merely A Gifted Eccentric.

Maybe It’s Not, In The End, The Virtues Of Others That So Wrenches Our Hearts As It Is The Sense Of Almost Unbearably Poignant Recognition When We See Them At Their Most Base, In Their Sorrow And Gluttony And Foolishness. You Need The Virtues, Too—some Sort Of Virtues—but We Don’t Care About Emma Bovary Or Anna Karenina Or Raskolnikov Because They’re Good. We Care About Them Because They’re Not Admirable, Because They’re Us, And Because Great Writers Have Forgiven Them For It.

It's The World, You Live In It, Even If Some Boy Has Made A Fool Of You.

There's Just This For Consolation: An Hour Here Or There When Our Lives Seem, Against All Odds And Expectations, To Burst Open And Give Us Everything We've Ever Imagined.

Venture Too Far For Love, She Tells Herself, And You Renounce Citizenship In The Country You've Made For Yourself.