You could continue to repress and think about the life you could have had or you can take what you want from life and see that the world finds that person infinitely more irresistible...
Sad-looking brown eyes, they wrenched his heart like a gut punch. Worse – hell, worse – a bloke could punch him in the head but he’d stay up, and grin through the bloody split lip, intimidating his attacker; but there was no honour in wounds in...
I could be the best lover you’ll ever have. Maybe not the best in bed, but I could be the best conversationalist. It’s called “pillow talk” for a reason, because most men fall asleep right after sex, leaving the pillow as the only thing a wom...
There’s no room in my life for a woman. I mean I live in a closet, and I suppose I could squish my clothes over and she could squeeze in, but where is she supposed to put her clothes? And her shoes, what about her shoes?
I came back, Uncle Eddie. Last year, after the Henley, I could have gone to any school in the world -- I could have done anything, but I came back." "You ran away, Katarina." "And now I'm back." "You're still running.
It struck Harold afresh how life could change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday - walking your partner's dog, putting on your shoes - and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.
He smiled. He liked to imagine that she saw the beauty, that she could think outside the well-worn tracks of her countrymen, find something to like about this unsophisticated place. Because that just might mean she could find something to like about ...
Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.
Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.
Kestrel's cruel calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people could be so easily become pieces in a game she was ...
There are two good reasons to put your napkin in your lap. One is that food might spill in your lap, and it is better to stain the napkin than your clothing. The other is that it can serve as a perfect hiding place. Practically nobody is nosey enough...
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.
I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.
My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . .
There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.
Isabel wondered if there would ever be a time when she could stop being careful. If there would ever be a time when she could use other kinds of power. She missed it. It felt like part of her had been injected with novocaine and was totally numb. Alm...
