People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.
“When I’m writing I want only to be at my desk. Whatever is sitting there feels fragile and fugitive. I worry that if I so much as turn my back, there will be a code blue. Moreover, I’m living inside those pages, in another reality altogether, which means I’m wholly useless at anything else. For at least a few years, you are a displaced person, holding off one world for the sake of another. And then there is the problem of lunch, in which the writer’s day craters.”
Stacy Schiff