An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.[It is] equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighbourhood of the ancient gods and goddesses.

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

I went towards the stairs, just as the band was playing 'Now is the Hour', and the music reached down like a long spoon inside me and stirred, and stirred.

I was baffled by my fuzzy hair and the attention it drew, and the urgency with which people advised that I have it 'straightened', as if it posed a threat.

... yalnızca başka bir dünyanın benim dünyama ulaşması sözkonusuydu; büyüyen, yeşil bir ağacın dalları arasından bir dizi güzel kurdele gibi edebiyat akıyordu ve güneşin ve mevsimlerin beklenen ve alışılagelmiş ışığından farklı olarak beklenmedik bir ışıkla yapraklara dokunuyordu.

There is a freedom born from the acknowledgement of greatness in literature, as if one gave away what one desired to keep, and in giving, there is a new space cleared for growth, an onrush of a new season beneath a secret sun. Acknowledging any great work of art is like being in love; one walks on air; any decline, destruction, death are within, not in the beloved; it is a falling in love with immortality, a freedom, a flight in paradise.

The dislike of her was general. I wonder now about the treatment of psychiatric and other patients who release, as if it were a chemical, an invitation to be disliked and who therefore have to fight (inducing further dislike and antagonism) for sympathy and fairness.