Maile Meloy Quotes

Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect on her at all.

But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations,...

Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip.

It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica'),

There's a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers, Bea said. It's that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their t...

They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.

Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and g...

To be a kid is to be invisible and to listen, and to interpret things that aren't necessarily meant for you to hear--because how else do you find out about the world?

We're creating little hedonists,' Frank used to say. 'Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They'll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.

When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The b...

Benjamin called it estro-lock, the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk...

Yvette had never talked about her marriage - she was a smart girl, and she knew you had no right to complain about someone you got all the way to the altar with. You made that choice, even if you were...