Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk Quotes

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.

If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For

Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I

Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity— one’s own and others’— but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

Time only goes in that one direction.

If one were HAPPY, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving. ... Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and

I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.

If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine—and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs—then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.

The use of the passive voice to disguise one’s role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You’re a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say ‘I refuse to pay you fairly’?

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

Even then I'd begun to think—and to push away the thought—that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.

I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs.

Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do.

Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.

The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

I do not eschew the shoulder pads and jewel tones I see on the mannequins, silly though they may be. Everything in fashion these days seems so childlike and bellicose, bright yet aggressive, a cute positivity that recasts every woman as a cross between a majorette and a Sherman tank.

Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.

The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.

one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested

courtliness being the gear that his engine idled in.

New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is.

like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing.

for the same reason I think people enjoy watching sports: seeing someone in full command of what he is expected to do, doing it better than most would, and doing so with joy. My

We’ve been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us? I

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention

most humor starts from irritation.

I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.

As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

When I have all of Manhattan to choose from I tend to dither, to hold out for perfection—but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.

When they sent us home from the hospital with him, it felt like we were actors, the leads in a heist film. Like we couldn't be getting away with such outrageous treasure.

When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.

You’re different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they’re invisible to us. They’re natural, like breathing. But they’re visible to you.

Olive was in the habit of saying “honestly” so often that even a child could see that she must be deceitful. I marveled at her mother’s prescience in having named her daughter after a green—with envy—cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.

Happiness and a love of fun are not coextensive, and their relationship may even be divergent. If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.

The way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline." He'd been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy's, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then.

Whenever somebody says to me, “Maybe it’ll come with age,” I want to say, “I wouldn’t count on it.

But people have come to make a hobby of detesting the birds, I think, because they’ve come to see that pigeons are much like people: dirty and murmuring, greedy and abundant, flocking in a corpus of such shit and weight that one fears they may permanently deface or crush whatever they congregate on.

Smoking helped me think and calmed my nerves, which I had in excess.

I am old and all I have left is time. I don't mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think.

No one survives the future, of course. Over the years I have rushed it, run from it, tried to shunt myself from it's track. That these efforts did not succeed does not mean that I regret them.

She is my friend...and thus our rapport has been unfraught and egalitarian, unburdened by guilt or disappointment.

If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, 'I wouldn't count on it.

Nostalgia for what’s new: The French probably have a word for that.

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

we’d been uptown at the Museum of Natural History at the time, safe beneath the blue whale hanging by its dorsal fin, unarmed and pacific, silent as ever, a sentinel in the lurid tabloid nightmare this city’s been dreaming.

The insouciance of youth doesn’t stay, but shades into “eccentricity,” as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I’ve always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, “Maybe it’ll come with age,” I want to say, “I wouldn’t count on it.

Olive, with her prim posture, her ungainly manner, and her reliance on elaborate fashions inappropriate for the office, strongly resembled a fancy pigeon: a creature bred out of its dignity across many generations.

It wasn’t that happiness led to humor, but more that humor could lead, perhaps, to happiness—that an eye for the absurd could keep one active in one’s despair, the opposite of depressed: static and passive.

this, they’ve never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don’t count anymore. I think it’s small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

I do wear underwear under them. I am a lady, after all; plus I don’t want a yeast infection, and who cares if I have a visible panty line?

A motto of mine had long been, “When the heart isn’t in it, all zest in the job is destroyed,

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity—one’s own and others’—but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

A lot of these love notes seem to be from well-read and lovesick young men with literary aspirations. That type doesn’t interest me in the least. They say they only have eyes for gazing at you and then end up gazing right back at their navels.

What makes you seek your fortune here / In Gotham? You must be as queer / As I am, and a million other / Insects far from home and Mother.

What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain. I

Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I’d made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds.

The creeping disaster that had started on Wall Street - part sickness, part madness, like a peril from Poe - had come finally to infect the whole country.

Maybe I’ll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That

That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within

We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed.” “I remember that,” I say. And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it—calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable—though it was Johnson who finally signed it.

No one survives the future,

All right, all right," he said, with that gesture I'd come to hate: two open palms facing me and patting the air, as if pushing me away, pushing me down, pushing any tears I might be preparing to cry back into their ducts.

one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.

that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.

For me, a peaceful atmosphere devoid of noise and distractions is absolutely the worst place for poetry, likely to wind me up in a doomed attempt to stare down a blank page. My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

I couldn’t argue. For years, that was how I did my work at R.H. Macy’s: If I understood better than you did yourself why you thought or did or wanted something, then I could control you.

Well, too bad, Diogenes: I make no apologies for a life that privileged pleasure, poise, and politesse. Had your lantern light fallen on my face that bright March morning I could have told you, honestly, that I have never been dishonest.

drinking, my distraction, my utter lack of pleasure in things—this last, I learned, called anhedonia, which to me sounded like the name of a flower Max never planted in the garden I never wanted.

Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon. I wondered whether my life might have turned out differently if I had gone with that title instead, as Artie had urged me to. Whether there was another world in which I had yielded to his request, and whether in that world I would not be standing alone under the full moon at Silver Hill, contemplating the wreck of my previous twenty years. But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.

Among the many unsurprising facts of life that, when taken in aggregate, ultimately spell out the doom of our species is this: People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.

Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

I very much enjoy that MTV, for instance, those music videos, and I watch them often, though I still find that a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood teaches me more about what’s new and exciting than any number of hours of television can. As ever, the street is the source of the latest things humans have invented—culturally speaking, at least. The last new things, maybe, that humans will ever invent.

In my youth, before I had made any of my most consequential choices—and isn’t that what we always mean by in my youth?

Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.

I didn’t believe in love at first sight. In fact, as I would soon be reminded by seemingly every literate person in New York, I had written and published more than a few poems lampooning the very idea of it. But one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

In order not to bother or be bothered by ghosts, you just act like you’re one of them. That’s what I do.

Can I let you in on a remarkable secret? I find that the more ideas I let myself have, the more ideas I have.

Now that you’ve become fashionable, are you in danger of falling out of fashion?

his new TV and his Negroni have helped me to see what is so repulsive to me in these ads: the way they depict, and thereby encourage, this infantilization of the country.

spent my first Christmas in the city alone. Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility.

I was happy to see Bennie’s liquor, if a bit disenchanted by its packaging. The prescription trick worked, but it always struck me as smug, inelegant, the wrong kind of clever. Most of us preferred to get our booze from honest crooks, who tended to be nicer and more interesting. It’s hard to deny that a willingness to risk prison imparts a certain magnetism in social settings.

The last poem I wrote before they sent me in was called “Blackout;” it went like this: When life seems gray And short of fizz It seems that way Because it is.

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving.