Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can't avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later.
It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.
I myself am mixed race - my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew - so I've always felt other.
Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.
You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.
In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.
But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.
The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there's nothing anyone can do or say. It's broken.
It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.
Oh," says Owen, "but I would have, you know." "I know you would have," says Liz, "and knowing you would have is nearly as good.
Sometimes things seem so unbearable in the middle of the night, don't they? In the middle of the night, we're all such children.
Betty inhales sharply, 'It's just I thought I had lost you forever.' Oh, Betty, don't you know there's no such thing as forever?
Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.
"I shouldn't have done that," I said. That was when I kissed him again. May God forgive me for this and all these things I've done.
Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me...I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.
Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.
There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.
I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.
Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.
My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.
In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.
No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.
The casualities seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.
I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don't necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It's not the best choice for creative writing.
In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.
When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.
I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.
I know you did, lass. You're the toughest girl I know." "'Lass'? Where did that come from?" "I don't know. I just felt the urge to call you that.
There's a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there's no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.
People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.
It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.
The things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life
It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.
Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.
Well, for one, you have to remember not to scream. Once you have their attention, whispering is much more effective. Screaming ghosts scare people, you know
My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.
I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.
A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.
If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.
And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I'd thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.
I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.
Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.
Daddy always said that an option that you know to have a bad outcome is only a fool's option, i.e., not an option at all. And I liked to think that Daddy hadn't raised a fool.
We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.
Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop