And if we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don’t have to fail with the force of our whole life. I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim wh...
An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned. Every
All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never get right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.
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 the ways to get to Torrance.
A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air.
We are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being plunged across the aby...
The woman you love is not in Tokyo or Paris or New York or Athens. The woman you love is a girl who dresses as a boy and she lives in a village in a jungle, the name of which you are not allowed to kn...
Received a gift—it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. Does your husband make you a better person? Edra asked. There I was i...
My mother knew that no woman thought she was beautiful, or beautiful enough, or beautiful in the right way.
You’re hardly even in the book. Caroline laughed. Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.
Whenever I kissed a boy in school, cut a day of classes, argued with my mother, over what I can’t remember, it was not God’s forgiveness I sought, but his. He was the one I told.
What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are your...
Only now, as I'm typing this, have I realized the only thing I wasn't thinking of was how lonely I was. I guess I was my old self for awhile there, my better self. Lately I've been completely obsessed...
No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.''But the other is better.''Better. I hate to say better, but it...
I’ll tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more am...
It was her plan to outrun all of that, and somewhere in that running she had started to fly. She no longer felt like touching all the dirt and the muck she had so patiently submitted herself to so tha...
It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we mght have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
Instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fode had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having the Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment,...
I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn't just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people,...