It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I have saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but no...
My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had NOT been empty. Relatively speaking, it was nothing - empty far longer than full. so much of herself had been inv...
What did Ethan care? _He_ had no trouble navigating. This was because he’d lived all his life in one house, was Macon’s theory; while a person who’d been moved around a great deal never acquired a fix...
But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
When you have children, you're obligated to live.
Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his se...
He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he'd heard was music-a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on wind and breaking his heart.
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
When I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I
Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him.
You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.
This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some . I want to make sure you realize that.
People like Eunice just never had quite figured out how to get along in the world. They might be perfectly intelligent, but they were subject to speckles and flushes; their purses resembled wastepaper...
It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.
But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by faste...
But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them.
What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth?...The spring mornings they woke up...