67 quotes found
Novelist · American
American novelist
“This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now lets go ahead and let her have it all.”
“When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.”
“Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.”
“I think it's a real gift to be able to say that what's in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.”
“We are assumed to be rather hopeless -- swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.”
“Are these real diamonds?" I once asked, and she said, "Why have them if they're not?”
“You don't get everything all at once. You wait.”
“It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being somethi...”
“I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?”
“She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron wi...”
“There I was, waiting, afraid I’d never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.”
“When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a characte...”
“I just want to say one thing. If I ever write a novel again, it's going to be in defense of weak women, inept and codependent women. I'm going to talk about all the great movies and songs and poetr...”
“I was downstairs, reading."" Now?" I strained to see her face. She was smiling, it appeared."Yes, now," she said. "It's nice, sometimes, to read in the middle of the night. The sky is so dark and s...”
“Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish,...”
“Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the nee...”
“But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one k...”
“I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we're all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it's a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, H...”
“I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd s...”
“Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.”
