Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It’s a plague. It’s like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.”STATE OF WONDER
Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.
The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.
When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtra
It’s easier to love a woman when you can’t understand a word she’s saying.
Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you’re not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Always remember, any book you haven’t read is still a new book.
… the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.
Katsumi Hosokawa – (he) believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.
The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.
Oh, my love,’ she said. ‘What do the only children do?”We’ll never have to know.
Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job.
It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.
Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.
The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly is always the love that is not returned.
He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together.
She didn’t know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.
I wanted two girls,” she said. “You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people’s children are too hard
…the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone…
Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It’s not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.
Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?
Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.
The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.
Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.
Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?
I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.
She’s growing up,” Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I’m not. Everything is exactly the same.
We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.
If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
…as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.
They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.
But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.
The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.
Somebody’s going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.””They’re free,” Franny said. “I check them out of the library.””Well, thank God for libraries,” Caroline said.
…was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women…