Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do," Dunbar told him. "Why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?
As long as I am winning, people shouldn't care whether my skirt is six inches long or six feet long. How I dress is a very personal thing. It is scary that every time I wear a T-shirt, it becomes a talking point for the next three days.
Walter Burns: Well well... how long is it? Hildy Johnson: How long is what? Walter Burns: You know what... how long is it since we've seen each other?
Lone Watie: We thought about it for a long time, "Endeavor to persevere." And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union.
But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who'd picked up the pieces after the musician, the inve...
It is high time that we grew up and left the Garden. We are indeed Eden’s children, yet it is time to place Genesis alongside the geocentric myth in the basket of stories that once, in a world of intellectual naivete, made helpful sense. As we walk...
It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war's end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to someth...
Well, this is only a story, isn't it? I mean, our patrons, anyone who comes to this park, are they going to take this to heart, Mister Shake?' They'll take what pieces they want, and everything gets a little skewed. That's how these things work, Fred...
Reflected in a rippling pool of gutter water a metal hawk razored across the midday sky, belching a long trailing shriek as she crossed zenith and descended talons-first into her nearby nest on the horizon. The prophet Austin’s shined black loafer ...
She was at that crucial age when a women begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the glowing sunset colors of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love. At such a moment ...
I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling re...
I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyo...
No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to...
Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you he...
Long story short, you will at least get that one unreasonable impulse to prove to yourself that that the invincibility and imperviousness that you feel during youth. It’s something tangible, something that can yield results like in chemistry lab or...
Piper went a little crazy. She cried out with relief and dove straight into the water. What was she thinking? She didn't take a rope or a life vest or anything. But at the moment, she was just so happy that she paddled over to Leo and kissed him on t...
When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater. We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the chan...
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.” She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that w...
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back t...
Love, is a Bloody Razor Blade Love came like fire from above and disappeared like a wet dream, underneath a leaky kitchen sink For weeks it went drip, drip, drip… until it could be, eventually fixed It took a long time to depreciate all the things ...
There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums.
