Quote collection
77 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret."
"Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for."
"Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness."
"My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses."
"Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself."
"I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds."
"I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes."
"Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me."
"I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers."
"For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication."
"It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing."
"In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live.""
"I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line. It's a weird way to move forward. It's kind of like a way to caterpillar your way through these great woods. The best ones, whatever I feel like I'm writing about, some other secret thing will begin to come into focus."
"My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida."
"The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things."
"And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way."
"Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything."
"Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose."
"I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory."
"Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them."