35 quotes found
Writer · American
American writer
“To listen to a person is not passive.”
“society's been drugging its women for years”
“The appetites of the body were private battles.”
“He hated dishonesty-- or lack of courage-- more than anything.”
“She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.”
“... and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.”
“What young people didnt know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies...”
“This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.”
“And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, ti...”
“People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced - but moving...”
“It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men”
“But what Tyler longed for was to have The Feeling arrive; when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow, every breath of breeze that bent the grass towards the r...”
“Angelina said, "Mom. I don't want you to die. That's the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I w...”
“She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at ths age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.”
“She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tel us who we are and what we think and what we do.”
“By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomac...”
“And he looked at me then, and with real kindness on his face, and I see now that he recognized what I did not: that in spite of my plenitude, I was lonely. Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted ...”
“I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don't know what my mother remembered either.”
“There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, toounexpec...”
“But she no longer felt sadness about it, the pressure of sorrow that had overtaken her at the table, the longing for all the Burgess kids, and the sense of the irreplaceable familiarity of her old ...”
“I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you cant even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beati...”
“I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear outside in the open air-when the conditions were exactly right-the corn growing in the fiel...”
