Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've worked with homeless kids, kids in foster care, and I've never met a kid who couldn't be reached.
My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
My last book, 'The Language of Flowers,' I wrote completely on naptime, when my little kids were asleep.
I have always felt that it's a little artificial to divide the sciences and the arts on college campuses.
If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat.
So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself.
Gold and diamonds are nice, but clean, crisp, controlled water has long been the preeminent hallmark of the rich.
When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.
What I tell young writers is to find those things that you're so passionate about that your energy doesn't run away.
I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.
I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.
The moment I'm interested in, the moment I'm working toward in these stories, is when the familiar world seems strange.
Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.
I grew up in Cleveland, so my heart got attached at a young age to the freight train of sadness that is Cleveland sports.
To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.
For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
I have spent a lot of time with foster children over the years - kids for whom I have not necessarily acted as a foster parent.
The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.
Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.
It is stories - both real and fictional - that can captivate hearts, change minds and, in the most powerful examples, spur action.
Basketball games - and seasons - make great narratives; they feature distinct acts, heroes and villains, and guaranteed resolutions.
Part of the story of Ghosts of Ascalon is how they got to that tentative truce where you can find humans and charr working together.
My mom is a science teacher in high school, and one of my brothers works in optics at Bell Labs, and so I was always surrounded by it.
Lewis Robinson's first novel, 'Water Dogs,' is stuffed with snow. Open practically any page of this book, and crystals will shake out.
Part of the story of 'Ghosts of Ascalon' is how they got to that tentative truce where you can find humans and charr working together.
If it's present in the life of the character, I'll write about it. Kitchen, bedroom, church, I'll follow a character wherever they go.
In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
As a college student, I worked as a mentor, and that got me involved in working with young people long before I became a foster parent.
I've always been so interested in both the visual beauty of mollusks and the tactile feel of them. As a kid, I collected them all the time.
We only get 60 years, if we're really lucky, as adults on earth, and why not try to wake up every day and learn something and talk to people?
Though politics is by nature divisive, surely we all can agree that foster children need stability, safety, education, opportunity - and love.
If you're lucky enough to have 70 years of literate adulthood, and if you read one book every week, you're still only going to get to 3,640 books.
Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs.
We were pressured to accept kids we were not qualified to handle. And we do that to people all the time, which is why we don't have enough foster parents.
My husband and I vowed that after we married and settled down, we would become foster parents - a vow we kept and one that has enriched our lives greatly.
We have been trained to broadcast our successes and hide our failures. But the truth is this: our failures humanise us, and they connect us to one another.
Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do.
You and I can go on YouTube and learn how to fix a tractor engine or learn Farsi. Groups are using those tools to recruit young people into a climate of hatred.
William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn't been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her.
I was a screenwriting and studio art major in college, so even though I don't have any training as a floral designer, I have a very particular visual aesthetic.
Fridays after school, especially when the weather was lousy, Mom would take me to the library. She'd let me check out whatever I wanted, and I checked out a lot.
We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual.
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.
Sometimes I wake at 2 A.M. worrying that my great-granddaughter will have to march through her distant, broiling future gathering all the plastic I ever disposed of.
The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.
I kind of do all of this writing as a way of thinking and learning. I'm sure it's similar to being a journalist: You get to learn, and that's the greatest kind of job.
Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.