A Quote by George Eliot
My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
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It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.
I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.
To be honest, I didn't want to get inside Jones's head. Every time I wrote about Jim Jones I practically had to tie myself to my chair to force myself to do it; I hated him so much. He wanted to go down in history and he did. He's had hundreds of books and articles written about him. I was much more interested in the stories of the rank-and-file members of Peoples Temple, what drew them to Jones, and what they did once they were trapped in Jonestown and realized Jones was intent on killing them.
How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them! We look for them, but do not see them; we listen to, but do not hear them; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them.
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on.
I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
Albert and I would spend hours and hours looking at them. Cleo had this big magnifying glass on his desk, and we'd find centipedes and grasshoppers and beetles and potato bugs, ants . . . and put them in a jar and look at them. They have the sweetest little faces and the cutest expressions. After we'd looked at them all we wanted to, we'd put them in the yard and let them go on about their business.
No one had to impose my enemies on me. I selected them myself. I didn't avoid them: I pointed them out, marked them, attacked them.
I feel a lot of sympathy for the young women I've written about, including Younger Janice. I think that all of them (me in Girlbomb, Samantha in Have You Found Her, and Elizabeth in I, Liar) had some early family trauma that contributed to their dysfunctional methods of dealing with the world, but I wouldn't call them/myself victims - survivors, maybe, but not victims. Nor do I think of them/myself as con artists.
I never tell students they cannot read a book they pick up, but I do guide them toward books that I think would be a good fit for them. I think of myself as a reading mentor-a reader who can help them find books they might like.
If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I’ve read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I’ll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another.
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
I've run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I've had that happen to me, and I've seen it happen to other people. I find it fascinating.
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