Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.
Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.
I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.
I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
A few years ago in Chicago, I rented an office, and I went there every day. For the most part I do work at home in an ugly room.
It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn't working.
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.
I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.
But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.
-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.
That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.