If I were taking notes, they would read: I see something. A shape? I have no idea. It’s not exactly the stuff that literary archives are made of.
I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my...
I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.
I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life’s great motivators, and my success would be my revenge
I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider...
His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute...
He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.
He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over...
He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He kne...
Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.
For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly , and from sources you never imagined to be probable.
Duty—honor—country,’ he said in the voice of an old white man who’d been battered by war. ‘Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.
Did you ever want to be a writer? No, she said, and she would have told him. I only wanted to be a reader.
DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The
Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable.
At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus.
As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to...
All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never got right, wasn't around for.
All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their li...
Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The