Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.
You have to speak your dream out loud.
If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice.
And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.
This tug-of-war often obscures what's also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of tribe, a run at happiness. You can't imagine how seriously I take that - even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.
It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.
Summer had come to sit on New York's face.
That for me is more important than anything when you're in the studio - to have somebody you can trust and who knows you, knows who you are and doesn't let you get away with anything.
I think people actually notice sometimes the content of what one is saying rather than the decibel level at which he says it. And a lot of times when people don't have a lot to say, they increase the volume.
The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!