Amy > Amy's Quotes

“Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“We all move uneasily within our restraints.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
― Henry Miller

“You are always someones favorite unfolding story”
― Ann Patchett

“I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.”
― Ann Patchett

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know

“If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale

“Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) ”
― Jonathan Franzen

“What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections