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.
It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get
 )
One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about. (from 'Celestial Navigation')
People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.
There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.
It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
When you have children, you're obligated to live.
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!
He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.
But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.
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.
If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.
He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.
There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.
I'm falling into disrepair
That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.
It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".
You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’
The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.
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.
...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.
I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.
The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
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.
She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses
No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.
And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.
You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?
I write because I want to have more than one life.
Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination; Liam couldn't decide which.
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.
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.
The thing about caller ID is,” Red said, more or less to himself, “it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.
You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.
This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some patient. I want to make sure you realize that.
, Maggie felt that the entire business of time's passing was more than she could bear. )
At this moment (letting a breeze ripple through her fingers like warm water), Maggie felt that the entire business of time's passing was more than she could bear.
She collected and polished resentments as if it were some kind of hobby.
For me, writing was the only way out.
I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much for reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.
It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.
But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty inky smell of mental fidgeting.
Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?
Face it,' I said. 'There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got,' I said.
Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges
Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.
She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.
Fifty years from now, strangers discovering this album at some parking-lot flea market would glance at us and flip the page, not even interested enough to wonder who we’d been.
But what I hope for in 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.
Much of Macon's youth was ruled by connotations.
One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?
Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of these netted onions in a grocery store.
They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the old scabby, stippled surface.
...apparently you grow to love whom you're handed.
She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them-an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.
Skinny as a fence post.
Ghosts... they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air - something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion.
Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth. 'What, cremation?' she asked. 'Death.
Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten, or dropped penny.
A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids.
I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
...that was Julian for you: reckless. A dashing sailor, a speedy driver, a frequenter of single bars, he was the kind of man who would make a purchase without consulting _Consumer Reports_.
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.
But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’
Just think how it would look if a reader walked into a café you'd recommended and found it taken over by vegetarians.
It was Serena who'd said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort.
Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led.
All I saw was one black cat, an insultingly paranoid type who shrank off as I drew near.
He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.
If I waited till I felt like writing, I would never write at all.
Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope.
Those who forget the past tend to regret the future
I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.
The trouble with dying is you don't get to stay around and see how everything turns out.
This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.
