Francesca Marciano > Francesca's Quotes

“When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don’t? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn’t see it when I looked in the mirror.
I always thought of writing as holy. I still do.”
― Deborah Eisenberg

“Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.”
― Amy Hempel

“Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Grief weighs nothing but you still have to drag it around.”
― Emily Rapp

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?” – President John F. Kennedy (June 11, 1963)”
― President John F. Kennedy

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“True enough,” said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. “I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.”
― Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies

“If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.”
― Ben Okri, Songs of Enchantment

“I've always thought that hell is the people you could one day become. The most frightening ones.”
― Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth

“Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.”
― Louise Erdrich

“... let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal." - President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (June 10th, 1963)”
― John F. Kennedy