He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn’t come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor...
I don’t like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.
You couldn’t relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole – like the world, or the person you loved.
It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one’s own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.
Getting inside your character’s head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can’t be duplicated in any other medium.
To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.
The happiest she’d ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?
The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?
Saul Bellow once said, ‘A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation’ – which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was – losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they’re true or invented, legend or fact.
The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.
The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.
Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you.
Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.
Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He’d failed so completely that he’d become his own man again.
Her anger was the fuel she used to keep going.
There was mystery at the heart of any of marriage, secrets even people close to it would never know.
Theirs was a private language, not shared with the rest of the world, and so exempt from censure, sheer burlesque.