How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?
She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma – that repetition – maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.
Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.
Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn’t let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.
Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger.
Dawn tinted the darkness like water ink.
Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.
You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain.
What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn’t write again until I was a senior in college.
How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.
I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don’t even know what’s going on with me until I’m writing. That doesn’t mean my books are autobiographical.
I think that Oprah’s on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.
My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.
Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.