Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am very sincere. Some people are always kidding, so when you're not, it's going to seem annoying to them.
We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.
I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.
... we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it.
It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.
She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.
It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
I'm totally not kidding. Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing.
I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.
I'm the kind of person who is always thinking, 'What if we had to spend the rest of our lives in a particular place?'
There's no law against asking strangers about their lives and feelings, although sometimes it really feels like there is.
I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.
I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.
There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.
The moment I feel pressure to read a book, I instinctively rebel against it - which is probably one reason I didn't last long in college.
That's the artist's job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.
As a young artist working in multiple mediums, the work and especially the writings of artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were very important to me.
It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting.
I think this is how life is. It's not a linear march through time; you revolve around the same old things as you age and acquire experiences.
I realize that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.
We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant that we were not alone in this world.
I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme.
I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic.
When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything.
I wish there were a class where we could just keep going around the circle. around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.
We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.
There's all different kinds of people, but I don't think it's that unusual that once you get like a little power, you get to do your weird thing even more.
All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.
I prefer a great novel, but many novels come with a bunch of novel-y writerliness that feels sort of macho to me, so I do end up reading lots of shorter things.
In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.
Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.
I nodded, pretending I was relaxed. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.
It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.
I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one's ever done that before. As if I'm literally the first person to ever write a book.
Well,I have a theory that men don't actually cry less than women,they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry,we are forced to invent our own unique method.
If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?
The life you live in front of an audience is like an altered state - it's not totally real. I'm always, even in the course of one day, trying to find ways to balance both sides.
Since I started making art, I've always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself — you know?
A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.
I eat an egg every morning, and when I'm done, I almost always have the thought: There. Now even if I'm captured and starved, I'll be able to live off the protein of that egg for a while.
If you want to have a character who falls into crisis, all you have to do is turn the Internet off, and then we all understand how that feels, when you suddenly just have time and yourself.
I eat an egg every morning, and when I'm done, I almost always have the thought: 'There. Now even if I'm captured and starved, I'll be able to live off the protein of that egg for a while.'
This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.
I'm often drawn in by a description of a woman thinking something familiar that's never been articulated before, as in Diane Cook's 'Somebody's Baby' or Nina Berberova's 'The Tattered Cloak.'
An erratum is a correction inserted into a book after publication. It's a nice thing to collect because you can't go after them, you just come upon them. In 25 years I've only found about 12.
When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinking about the fact that I'm thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It's one element of hypnosis.
This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else.
Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.
The thing I am most interested in is power relations - it is so easy in a relationship like that [of an artist and a gallery manager], to imagine that the other person is living a perfect life.