Biography
"I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place."
"I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them."
"It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice."
"The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning."
"Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age."
"Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!"
"For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood."
"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."
"The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest."
"I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get"
"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."
"Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne."
"People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more."
"The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them"
"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."
"Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him."
"People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have."
"I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside."
"He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all life's problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him."
"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."