8 Quotes by Katie Roiphe

Everything that flickered could be made permanent. That was what drew him to photography, what made every painstaking step worth it: the permanence of the image. That was what fascinated him, the working against time...

It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

In spite of its romantic frisson, the position of muse is very vague and largely thankless for the muse herself.

Facebook is the novel we are all writing.

The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick.

For us there is little to say. After all, we know that death belongs to life, that it is unavoidable and comes when it wants.

She was monumentally, conspicuously damaged in a way that was, to us then, ineffably chic.

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent’s Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed.