Quote collection
647 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds."
"I very rarely read the responses to my Salon pieces, because (as you may have noticed) the trolls can be SO evil. So violent in their hostility to me and my work. OK, wait, wait, wait. That's a lie. I do read the responses--and get mesmerized, like cobra hypnosis. But I laugh (mostly) at the trolls, and think about what tiny little weenies they must have. (They seem to be mostly men.) And then ALL these smart, funny people leap to my defense, which is medicine, and fills me with love and thankfulness."
"I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus."
"Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers."
"Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children."
"All criticism hurts me. I'm so in the wrong business."
"Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer."
"only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it."
"Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we're all at a wedding. But you can't just come out and say, We're at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this."
"My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some sort of gift and when it came time to try to find a publisher I had a little bit of an "in" because I had his agent I could turn to, to at least read my initial offerings when I was about 20. But the only problem was that they were just awful, they were just terrible stories and my agent, who ended up being my agent, was very, very sweet about it, but it took about four years until I actually had something worth trying to sell."
"I accidentally forgot to graduate from college."
"Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen."
"It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you."
"Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor."
"...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind."
"Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference."
"Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty - you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you're spackling."
"Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may."
"When he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those little car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat."
"The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life."