71 quotes found
Novelist · American · 1950
American novelist (born 1950)
“A life I didn't choose chose me.”
“When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.”
“Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.”
“So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.”
“I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows fr...”
“I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.”
“Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.”
“A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.”
“All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.”
“People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Garys mother had accepted him as her sons lover, had ...”
“Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?”
“Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.”
“I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about bec...”
“Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.”
“If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.”
“Maybe that's what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.”
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.”
“That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to ...”
“If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.”
“I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through ...”
“[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and ...”
“So maybe thats what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.”
