As long as we remember a person, they’re not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.
Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.
The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant.
My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
So, whenever I’m writing, I’m writing in the presence of all the other books I’ve read and I think we all are.
He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more – a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.
All his life he had wanted to be known by just one person. That’s what love was, he decided. Love was being known.
All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.
For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.
A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories – of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it’s body keeping always longing to be known.
Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitudes. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. We may have loved, but never well enough. We never truly knew ourselves. We forgot the world; now it has forgotten us.
A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.
In her mind’s eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death’s great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.
How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words.
Behind every great hatred is a love story.
What is home but a place where you are truly known?
The heart, once broken, stayed broken.
Maybe just being alive, and having someone to love who loved you back, was enough.