Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction – they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.