80 quotes found
Writer · American · 1958
American writer (born 1958)
“Once again I am only who I am.”
“Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.”
“Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.”
“The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.”
“A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.”
“. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.”
“It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.”
“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end,...”
“Then, the massive hands lifted the new people up to a pair of giant indescribable lips and whispered, in a fundamentally untranslatable Creator-language, something that meant, approximately: THIS T...”
“Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.”
“Trap. Horrible trap. At ones birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. ...”
“This, it occurred to me, this was the undisciplined human community that, fired by its dull collective wit, now drove the armed nation towards it knew-not-what sort of epic martial cataclysm: a mas...”
“I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless d...”
“What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmat...”
“Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit...”
“In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at t...”
“I felt myself a new species of child. Not a boy (most assuredly) but neither a (mere) girl. That skirt-bound race perpetually moving about serving tea had nothing to do with me. I had such high hop...”
“The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?”
“...But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.”
“In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a dove and a hawk, say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus star...”
“I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing.”
“And there was nothing left for me to do, but go. Though the things of the world were strong with me still. Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; ...”
“One feels such love for the little ones, such anticipation that all that is lovely in life will be known by them, such fondness for that set of attributes manifested uniquely in each: mannerisms of...”
“He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness.”
“I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, dont you think?”
