Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
