Author Quotes

Giving up her home had been a much greater wrench than she had expected.... She had a curious sense of her own roots twined around the house, as she had once seen a tree's roots around an old shrine. In time the roots had grown into every crevice until shrine and tree were one indestructible entity.

Alice Tisdale Hobart

When the desire ain't on me I don't need help. When it is on me I don't want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn't do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody's.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Linda Barnes (writer)

The past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.

What linked them was not only the closeness they'd felt as children, but also the fear of losing that closeness.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

Writing is like exploring. Although the country a writer explores is imaginary, the discoveries he makes there are real. For it is the business of writers to reveal truths to us about ourselves and our lives.

Lawrence Osgood

The spring in Boston is like being in love: bad days slip in among the good ones, and the whole world is at a standstill, then the sun shines, the tears dry up, and we forget that yesterday was stormy.

Louise Closser Hale

I wanted to be a Bride of Christ but I guess now I'm a young divorcee.

When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I've no more left of you.

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.

The heart holds, like remembered music,
a landscape grown too dark to see.

Death is a statistic for the computers.

You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Minnie Maddern Fiske

Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

Deborah Garrison

Sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go,
But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago.

George Cooper (poet)

This piercing cold I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom
under my heel...

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

Husbands and wives quarrel a lot more than anyone thinks, and it's oftener about little things than big ones.

Patricia Wentworth

Indian time conveys an old grasp of time and life, perceived and experienced collectively by Indian people.... From the edge of Indian time overlooking infinity, there is acute perception and perspective.

Anna Lee Walters