I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live...
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
Candy took the bathing suit from her and used the suit to wipe the tears from Rose Rose's face.You're fine, you're just fine, Candy said to the girl. And you're going to feel better. No one's going to...
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.
…it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly,...
While we waited to see what God would do. I heard a tear fall—it was one of my grandmother’s tears, and I heard it patter upon the cover of the Pilgrim Hymnal, which she held in her lap. Please give u...
Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck...
What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.
What a phrase that is: that explains everything! I know better than to think that anything explains everything today.
What a new sense of security Homer had felt in that moment of laughter with friends in the enclosed dark of the moving car, and what a sense of freedom the car itself gave to him—its seemingly effortl...
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.
We are formed by what we desire
This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they...
There are many unintentionally cruel talents that the world, indiscriminately, hands out to us. Whether we can use these gifts we never asked for is not the worlds concern.
The thing about sin, Jack, is that some people think it’s very important and other people don’t even believe it exists.
The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it’s the perfect thing to have happen at that time.
The day women stop reading—that’s the day the novel dies! the
Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.
Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.