Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
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.
Look, don’t just stare at the pages,” I used to tell my students. “Become the characters. Live inside the book.
Religion’s just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.
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.
If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.
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 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.
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?
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 be happy.
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.
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 the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
So maybe that’s what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.
Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she’s had a very sad life.
You know what ‘Dolores’ means? It’s Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?
As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.
People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them — to feed them or fix them.
Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be smart enough to know the difference.
What if I don’t like adventure?Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.
Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.
We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.
The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.
You can be two things if you’re a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place – even if it kills you.
I thought about how love was always the thing that did that – smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?
Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be smart enough to know the difference
That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.
Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.
Life’s a shit sandwich, my ass. Life’s a polka and don’t you forget it!
A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.
Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I’ve undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love.
When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.
Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.