54 quotes found
Novelist · American · 1941
American novelist (born 1941)
“I'm falling into disrepair”
“For me, writing was the only way out.”
“Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?”
“I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get”
“Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.”
“I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.”
“It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.”
“My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's lik...”
“Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth.'What, cremation?' she asked.'Death.”
“The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.”
“She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human bei...”
“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”
“It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".”
“She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.”
“It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.”
“You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.”
“Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by ...”
“There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, an...”
“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But i...”
“For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.”
“He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he'd heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart.”
“Alex Barrows broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestlers body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him ha...”
“He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two d...”
“The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them”
