Quote collection
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy."
"I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that."
"Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too."
"What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless."
"How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?"
"The despairing soul is a rebel."
"The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life."
"Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding."
"What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen."
"I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing."
"Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing."
"And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness."
"These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not."
"That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?"
"I am more or less reading all the time."
"Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring."
"I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections."
"Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce."
"Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending."
"Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process."