Quote collection
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it."
"Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off."
"Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."
"I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January."
"It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise."
"To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it."
"Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa."
"Time cures you first, and then it kills you."
"This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it."
"There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky."
"I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included."
"It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are."
"The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do."
"Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it."
"Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes"
"A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do."
"Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."
"Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people."
"Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger."
"The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world."