56 quotes found
Writer · American
American writer
“who knows you better than your own brother?”
“We call them feelings because we feel them.”
“I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.”
“Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.”
“I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.”
“I couldn't fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I'd ...”
“Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they ...”
“A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.”
“So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have...”
“The Indians did not like to see anything odd -- a white squirrel, for instance. . . . They thought such oddities were messages, were omens of evil. . . . And the Indians put a great deal of faith i...”
“Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.”
“Im seeing so much of America today, Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him whenever things were not to his liking, hed say that Im seeing...”
“I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)”
“Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat ...”
“Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.”
“Language does this to our memoriessimplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
“What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining ...”
“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”
“There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing...”
“We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.”
“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesnt mean that the story isnt true,only that I honestly dont know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Langua...”
“Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.”
