“I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer.As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint.I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively. I frame the cheerful response.What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine.Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
-
Working on it...
-
Working on it...
-
Working on it...
-
Working on it...
Similar quotes
“I am not menopausal. I just wanted half an hour alone. Is that too much to ask? A crappy half hour!”
“When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.”
“How am I doing so far?" she asked, forcing a cheerful lightness into her voice."You're doing very well," Nick's lazy voice mocked. "I'm half convinced that I'm invisible.”
“Half the time I have no idea what I'm doing. The other half, I'm trying to undo what I did when I didn't know what I was doing. That leaves, let's see now . . . one more half. That last half is divided into three halves, one for working, one for writing, and one for asking the mother of all rhetorical questions . . . WTF?”
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it”