Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.
You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.
I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.
That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.
There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.
Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.
You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.