Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My husband was working as principal of an urban transformation high school - the kind of public charter school determined to do whatever it takes to give its mostly minority, low-income student body the education they need and deserve to be successful in life.
All around us right now, tucked into the valleys and along the coasts, bookshops glow in the winter light. Think of them like singular, magical, and multi-dimensional recipe boxes. They wait for us to pluck out a card, to stand over the stove, to start cooking.
Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.
I subscribe to the theory that reading a book is similar to walking a trail, and I'm most comfortable walking when I can see where I'm going and where I've been. When I'm reading a printed book, the weight of the pages I've turned gives me a sense of how far I've come.
I founded Camellia Network with my dear friend Isis Dallis Keigwin. The mission of our organization is to create a national network that connects every youth aging out of foster care to the critical resources, opportunities, and support they need to thrive in adulthood.
I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.
At Camellia Network, we believe if we can create a way of identifying every young person aging out of foster care, defining what they need, and giving a community of supporters a simple and clear way to fulfill those needs, we can produce radically improved outcomes for youth.
Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences.
'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook.
If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously, as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.
'Guild Wars 2' is a wider world in that we have a lot of different mechanics available for storytelling. We have our personal story, the story of you, which is tailored for your character. You answer some basic questions; you make some decisions early on, and that follows through.
I think that the hardest thing about working with young people in foster care who've been through this kind of neglect and abuse is really to convince them that they are worthy of being loved. And I think because often they don't feel worthy of it, that's why they push people away.
One of the turning points in the look of the Guardian is when we decided Logan Thackeray would be a Guardian as opposed to a Warrior. Logan's own protective nature and the fact that the humans have been knocked back into defensive positions informed a lot of what the Guardian became.
The sense of discovery only comes when I'm making discoveries alongside the reader. It feels crucial for me to not know too much about how things will turn out. So I try to develop strong characters with recognizable desires and put them together with other characters and see what happens.
After trying several unreliable web site hosts, I signed up with NitroTek and was pleased to discover there is a reliable, easy to work with service available to individuals and companies who want to keep a solid presence on the net. NitroTtek is a helpful, no-hassles company to work with.
Hour by hour, minute by minute, I make decisions that seem like the right things to do at the time but which prevent me from reflecting on the most significant, most critical fact in my life: Every day, I participate in a system that is weaponizing our big, gorgeous planet against our kids.
Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.'
I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out.
I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I'm like, 'What do you mean he's dead?' We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.
We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.
I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.
The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.
In my students, I'm always dispelling the notion that characters come like a light bulb over the head in cartoons. For me, it's like a shapeless big lump of clay. You just build it into something, and then you step back and go, 'That's not right,' hack it apart, put out a new arm, and say, 'Maybe this will walk around and work.'
The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
My parents would drive us to Florida every spring in this big old, rusy Suburban, and we'd collect stuff on the beach for our aquarium back in Ohio; we had this big saltwater aquarium back in Ohio. Every time we found anything, any mollusk, my mom would bring out the guidebook and quiz us on what it was, so that stuff was built in early.
For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth.
Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.
I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.
Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,' my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor.
She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.
THE STORIES WE TELL fearlessly explores the textures of the human heart, finding a path toward hope through a Savannah that is jagged with class issues, faith misused, and broken trust. Henry loses you in a landscape peopled with secret keepers, storytellers and liars, and proves that in the end, love is the only reliable compass. This is everything you expect from Patti Callahan Henry—lyrical writing, characters worth rooting for, a sure-footed belief in the power of goodness—plus a twisty plot that will keep the pages turning long into the night.
The only thing I can say that is not bullshit is that you do have to learn to write in a way that you would learn to play the violin. Everybody seems to think that you should be able to turn on the faucet one day and out will come the novel. I think for most people it's just practice, practice, practice, that sense of just learning your instrument until - when you have an idea on the violin, you don't have to translate it into violin-speak anymore - the language is your own. It's not something you can think your way into, or outsmart. you've just got to do it.