The kind of love that offers itself so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.
The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest.
That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think th...
Since my grandmother died, I have dreamed about her every night. I go back to The Neighborhood and I find her again. Her death was just a misunderstanding. She is better now, walking and laughing, tel...
Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at al...
She's a nice girl, Tennessee said as a way of saying goodbye to them, as a way of saying thank you and I'm sorry, as a way of saying, I wish I had never let you go and I wish we had never met.
She didn’t even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.
She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.
People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them.
Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12...
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. This
Ninety percent of what I know about fiction writing I learned that year. Write it out. Tell the truth. Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing.
Messner sighed and handed him the phone. One minute. I swear it, Simon said. He was already dialing the number. The phone rang five times and then the answering machine picked up the line. It was his...
Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reaso...
Kitty stopped the cart and put in two three-packs of paper towels. Sale. Sabine nodded. Was $2.49 a good price? To know if paper towels were a deal this time, you’d have to remember what they cost las...
It’s a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but you also have to find him or her at a time in life when you’re able to listen to, trust, and implement the lessons you receive.
It's like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up the leaves so no one would notice what had happened.
It was soaring, that voice, warm and complicated, utterly fearless.
It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.