141 quotes found
“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist ei”
“It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more...”
“Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to...”
“Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.”
“You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.”
“Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.”
“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you h...”
“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”
“Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You´re nostalgic!" She repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" She asked."Seventeen, " I told her."Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, W...”
“According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or p...”
“That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up.”
“You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choice.”
“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”
“Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.”
“Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of ...”
“I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!”
“...where our desires "come from"; that is a dark, winding road.”
“Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”
“Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”—what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots—and they were too set in their ways or too...”
“When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.”
