There’s a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.
It’s a brooding melancholy that haunts me.
Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don’t need.
Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.
I became paralyzed as an artist with writer’s block.
I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.
I think of myself as a really happy person.
I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.
I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.
I’m interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.
The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.
He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it.
For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.
I don’t feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me – it’s not something I have a choice about. Isn’t a feeling like that supposed to happen? I can’t make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us – we can’t feel Him.
He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody’s head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.
I’d rather know I can trust you. So before you read what’s in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn’t too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good.
Tell the truth,′ Nels said. ‘Decide to tell the truth before it’s too late.
He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband’s death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence – something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.
The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.
I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I’ve discovered. I don’t love you, Ishmael.