A Writer's Ruminations

"Four or five stories, soft as clouds, changing shape as I watch them. The form of my life—the external form—is nothing compared with the anguish over giving form to these imagined mirrors of life. Must reality become unreal? Record, then, that we took the train and walked in the royal park at Marly, and lay in the uncut grass under a sky as warm as wool and blue as itself. The chestnut trees looked as though nothing could oblige them ever to shed their leaves; and when the wind bent the grass around the barren flat, submissively, the grass went all one color, silvery, like the underside of leaves, as if it might rain."

— Mavis Gallant, from a diary entry written in May 1959 (via The New Yorker)