Quotes by Deborah Eisenberg

Stop that Stuart, Patty said as Stuart struggled with the suitcases, which were too heavy for him, she thought. (Almost everything was way too heavy for Stuart.) Just put those down. Besides, Patty said, where will you go? You dont have anyplace to go. But Stuart took her hand and held it for a moment against his closed eyes, and despite the many occasions when Patty had wanted him to go, and the several occasions when she had tried to make him go, despite the fact that he was at his most enragingly pathetic, for once she could think of nothing, nothing at all that he could be trying to shame her into or shame her out of, and so it occurred to her that this he would really leave---that he was simply saying good-bye. All along, Patty had been unaware that time is as adhesive as love, and that the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as friendship, as if that were the end of the matter,when the truth is that even if your friend does something annoying, or if you and your friend decided that you hate each other, or if your friend moves away and you lose each others address, you still have a friendship, and although it can change shape, look different in different lights, become an embarrassment or an encumbrance or a sorrow, it cant simply cease to have existed, no matter how far into the past it sinks, so attempts to disavow or destroy it will not merely constitute betrayals of friendship but, more practically, are bound to be fruitless, causing damage only to the humans involved rather than to that gummy jungle(friendship)in which those humans have entrapped themselves, so if sometime in the future youre not going to want to have been a particular persons friend, or if youre not going to want to have had that particular friendship you and that person can make with one another, then dont be friends with that person at all, dont talk to that person, dont go anywhere near that person, because as soon as you start to see something from that persons point of view (which, inevitably, will be as soon as you stand next to that person) common ground is sure to slide under your feet.

When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated ones own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of them and turn it to ones own purpose and pierce through the murk, it became blunt and useless as a piece of cardboard.

Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

Im a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. Its certainly the most miserable state to be in but its also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified.