Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.
An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.
This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.
If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.
I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.
Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.
I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.
We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.
She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.
I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.
I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world.
Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.
Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.
Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way.
Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.
(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says. Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.
I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.
I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.
I've had nonstop financial problems my whole adult life. It's always been a constant balance, year to year: 'Where's the time? Where's the money?'
A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.
Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.
Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.
Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states.
You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?
A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.
Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.
I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.
The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'
The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'
I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.
For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'
She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing
Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
I grew up with 'Life' magazine on the coffee table, Life cereal on the breakfast table, and the game of Life on the card table. People were just so happy to be alive, I guess.
I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!
Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.
But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.