126 quotes found
Author · American · 1963
American author (born 1963)
“One must not be shy where language is concerned.”
“Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.”
“The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.”
“... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.”
“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just...”
“Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the comp...”
“Katsumi Hosokawa - (he) believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.”
“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it."STATE OF WONDER”
“He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning o...”
“For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer fo...”
“The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.”
“Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?''We'll never have to know.”
“Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job.”
“I missed my mother's father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how it would have changed...”
“The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as the stripper soundtra”
“Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”
“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing ...”
“Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.”
“The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.”
“It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in ...”
“The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to writeand many of the people who do writeget lost.”
“Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.”
“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”
