“Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.”

—Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

“Heart weeps. 
Head tries to help heart. 
Head tells heart how it is, again: 
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. 
Heart feels better, then. 
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. 
Heart is so new to this. 
I want them back, says heart. 
Head is all heart has. 
Help, head. Help heart.” 

—Lydia Davis from Varieties of Disturbance: Stories.

“These days I try to tell myself that what I feel is not very important. I’ve read this in several books now: what I feel is important but not the center of everything. Maybe I do see this, but I do not believe it deeply enough to act on it. I would like to believe it more deeply. What a relief it that would be. I wouldn’t have to think about what I felt all the time, and try to control it, with all its complications and all its consequences. I wouldn’t have to try to feel better all the time. In fact, if I didn’t believe what I felt was so important, I probably wouldn’t even feel so bad, and it wouldn’t be so hard to feel better. I wouldn’t have to say, oh, I feel so awful, this is like the end for me here, in this dark living room late at night, with the dark street corner outside under the street lights, I am so very alone, everyone else in the house asleep, there is no comfort anywhere, just me alone down here, I will never calm myself enough to sleep, never sleep, never be able to go on to the next day, I can’t possibly go on, I can’t live, even through the next minute. If I believed that what I felt was not the center of everything, then it wouldn’t be, but just one of many things, off to the side, and I would be able to see and pay attention to other things that were equally important, and in this way I would have some relief. But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it. So I still act as though my feelings were the center of everything, and they still cause me to end up alone by the living-room window late at night. What is different, now, is that I have this idea: I have the idea that soon I will no longer believe my feelings are the center of everything. This is a real comfort to me, because if you despair of going on, but at the same time tell yourself that your despair may not be very important, then either you stop despairing or you still despair but at the same time begin to see how your despair, too, might move off to the side, one of many things.”

—Lydia Davis, What I Feel
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“ “I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It’s hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I’ll take it, I’ll buy it. That’s what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn’t that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that’s why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn’t the pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.”

—Lydia Davis

“But they would sometimes stop before the complete disclosure of a thought and would then try to imagine a phrase that could express it anyway. She did not confess her passion for another man; he did not say that he had forgotten her.”

—Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
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