Amy Doan > Amy's Quotes

“I'd had kisses. Rushed, wet, tasting of beer, right out in the open. I'd messed around with a funny sophomore in my anthropology seminar and a shy journalism grad student, and while these nights were satisfying in their way, the pleasure didn't last past 2:00 am.
I missed patience, the sweet, smoky taste of scotch. And the gut thrum of the forbidden.
Instead of obscuring my memory of him, the hours I spent with boys at school slid to the edges and collected around it, like a frame.”
― Amy Mason Doan, Summer Hours

“We used to escape together, years ago, when we were so sure we could steal time before it stole us.”
― Amy Mason Doan, Summer Hours

“My childhood home in Coeur-de-Lune was now a vacation rental, managed by efficient strangers. I'd never gone back. But my mother kept a buzzing gossip line into her church women from town, and gave me sporadic updates on Casey's life.

She always brought Casey up when I was lulled into complacency. When we'd had a surprisingly peaceful afternoon together. When we were outside on her balcony, or sharing a piece of her peach pie like other mothers and daughters did.

Only then would she jab, a master fencer going for the unprotected sliver of my heart.”
― Amy Mason Doan, The Summer List

“From the water it looked like a boat, with rows of small, high windows—so much like portholes—and a long, skinny dock—pirate's gangplank—to complete the effect. When the place started falling apart in the '70s, some grumbly neighbor called it The Shipwreck, and the name had stuck.

It was a love-it-or-hate-it house, and the Shepherd women had loved it.

So had I.”
― Amy Mason Doan, The Summer List

“One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.”
― Chris Ware

“We are a package deal, however. Our trait of sensitivity means we will also be cautious, inward, needing extra time alone. Because people without the trait (the majority) do not understand that, they see us as timid, shy, weak, or that greatest sin of all, unsociable. Fearing these labels, we try to be like others. But that leads to our becoming overaroused and distressed. Then that gets us labeled neurotic or crazy, first by others and then by ourselves.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“I am deeply moved by things. I’d hate to miss the intense joy of that.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“I was learning the habit of attention, of noticing the world in all its ravishing detail and complexity. The habit of being amazed. They told stories, looking at objects and people until they shook them clean of the dust of everyday and made them myth.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“There is no intimacy as great as that between young girls. Even between lovers, who cross boundaries we are accustomed to thinking of as at the furthest territories of closeness, there is a constant awareness of separateness, the wonder at the fact that the loved one is distinct, whole, with a past and a mind housed behind the eyes we gaze into that exist, inviolate, without us. It is the lack of such wonder that reveals the depth of intimacy in that first chaste trial marriage between girls.”
― Emily Bitto, The Strays

“It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Citizens. That's what Cap calls people who stay put, who have regular jobs. Who go to school. When he's feeling sorry for them, Cap calls them SSNs. Social Security Numbers.
When I was little, I used to think he was saying "assassins.”
― Amy Mason Doan, The California Dreamers

“Is DREAMERS the truth?
It captures something truthful. The joy of racing from what doesn't matter toward what does, surrounded by the tiny group of people on the planet who understand you...
But capturing something truthful isn't the same as telling the truth.”
― Amy Mason Doan, The California Dreamers

“That picture had been taken so long ago, in another life, that the girl is a stranger.
Her stance is wide, confident...she gazes off to her right so you can see her determined profile, and her sunlit hair, never cut, is a wild, bright mass dancing in the wind.”
― Amy Mason Doan, The California Dreamers

“Each wave is the ocean pushing us back to land, commanding us to go, be mortal gain. But every time we paddle back out we're saying, 'Not yet, please. Not just yet.”
― Amy Mason Doan, The California Dreamers