Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
She would live now, not read.
I had my first baby at twenty-one.
The constant happiness is curiosity.
It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.
In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
I read all the time, and I'm often struck by something I'm reading.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
I feel that I've done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.
I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people's lives present themselves.
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.
I can have people around a lot more because I'm not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.