He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.
Stubborn heart,′ I said. ‘Long memory. Bad mix.
A man living in a place that doesn’t change doesn’t expect it ever will.
It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.
We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.
Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.
The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation that would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.
Little Sally is beheading daisies on the drive... couldn’t be more eloquent if she could speak...
There was the stink of burning martyr in the air.
My Templeton is to Cooperstown as a shadow is to the tree that spawned it; an outline that takes texture from the ground it falls on.
Then he tells his son, “This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you’d never have again.” He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. “Surfacing,” he says.
Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions – how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.
In the far reaches of the county, cottages were found with skeletons enlaced in the beds, the bones of the baby in the kettle.
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It’s also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is “the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders,” as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.
As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.