Quotes by Stewart O'Nan

About Stewart O'Nan:

Stewart O'Nan is an American novelist.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

Stewart O'Nan

I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be ...

Stewart O'Nan

It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don't fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were--their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven--and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the mor...

Stewart O'Nan

Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to...

Stewart O'Nan

Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys i...

Stewart O'Nan

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

Stewart O'Nan

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was ol...

Stewart O'Nan

Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.

Stewart O'Nan

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.

Stewart O'Nan

They should." "Should be like a wood bee," she said. It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote su...

Stewart O'Nan

The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?

Stewart O'Nan

What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?

Stewart O'Nan

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

Stewart O'Nan

Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women--all people, finally--complicated?

Stewart O'Nan

He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping ...

Stewart O'Nan

I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.

Stewart O'Nan

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

Stewart O'Nan

I've always been a big reader.

Stewart O'Nan

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.

Stewart O'Nan

If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.

Stewart O'Nan

Author Bio

  • NameStewart O'Nan
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornFebruary 4, 1961
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist