A.M. Homes Quotes

Was there ever a time you thought - I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don't know why.

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

It annoys the hell out of me when people say, This is the kitchen, and this is the bathroom. What am I, Helen Keller? I mean, it's pretty obvious when you're in a kitchen and when you're not.

The weird thing about having your birthday on a school day is that by the time you get to be ten, or eleven for sure, no one at school knows it's your birthday anymore. It's not like when you're little and your mom brings cupcakes for the whole class. But even though no one knows, you walk around like it's supposed to be a national holiday. You walk around thinking that people are supposed to be nice to you, like maybe on your birthday you're ten times more breakable than on any other day. Well, it doesn't work that way. It just doesn't.

There's something excruciating about this part. Strangers, or, even worse, friends, crouch at the children's knees, touching them, hugging them, stressed faces one after another pressing into theirs, faces like caricatures. There is the awkwardness of people feeling the need to say something when there is nothing to say. Nothing.

We're all good when we want to be, otherwise we're fucking animals. There's no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can't Google the answers. People talke about being on the ride of your life - THIS IS YOUR LIFE. Whatever you need to know, you already know. Imagine what it is to be in another country, another landscape - heat, insects, fear. Imagine watching someone right in front of you trip on a wire, step on a mine, blow their body to shreds, in mid-sentences, mid-cigarette. Imagine yourself splattered with human flesh. Imagine talking to that boy for the five minutes when he is profoundly conscious of the fact that he is not goingt to make it home. Imagine the difference between that and being in upstate New York, drinking beer, trying to get laid, and spending the summer as lifeguard at Lake George. Imagine zipping your friends into body bags. Tell me why anyone ever thought this was a good idea. How could anyone not be angry? You'd have to be insane." --Nic Thompson

There are strangers, people we don't know, who care about is.

Even though I thought I wouldn't - could never - I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one's self, like seeing one's self with a certain sense of remove.

You are your own beginning. Every day, every hour, every minute, you start again. There is no point wishing you were someone else, you are who you are - start there.

I don't want to be one of those women who says horrible things about her husband, but your father had no right to take the hammer. I had that hammer when we were still dating, and he damn well knew it.

You can't collect everything," Pat says, putting the dress in with the giveaways. "Life is not a hobby.

Normally I'm a movie freak. In fact, I am a movie. It's always me out there in a medium close-up. It's like there's a camera on me, trailing me, getting down every move. A long, slow, tracking shot of my life.

I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken. It is not something I might recover from but something I must accept, to live with- with compassion.

I turned the steering wheel as far as I could. The old blue Volvo didn't believe in power steering.
"More," my father said.
I thought I was going to die. I thought I might have a heart attack. I thought if I ever had to drive that car, I'd end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"I think I'm having a heart attack," I said.
"What?"
"Never mind.

The strange days of summer. There is no here, no there, the days are incredibly still, the light is brightly muted--it's hard to know if that's the passing of the season or poor air quality.

You don't become a different person
you just learn to live with yourself
thats the hardest part.

I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband's family name - she is in effect lost, evaporated from all records under her maiden name. I finally understand the anger behind feminism - the idea that as a woman you are property to be conveyed between your father and your husband, but never an individual who exists independently. And on the flip side, it is also one of the few ways one can legitimately get lost - no one questions it.

I nodded. It was his checklist. Every time we were together we went through this. He ran down his list of people, events, even actual objects that were in my life.

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,

I love my foot. If I had to send a part of myself to represent myself in some other country, or in some other way, I would amputate my foot and send it wrapped in white tissue on a silk-embroidered cushion. I would send my foot because it is me, more me than I'm willing to let on.

She starts to cry. 'It's just so terrible,' she says.
'Which part?,' I ask.
'Being human.

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.

Silly bug, fly on the wall, our first fight and how quickly we are over it. Of course I don't hate you, dearest, beloved, most cherished, I owe you everything.

For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you've got to let go of the past.

There is a sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me. So glad to see you, I say, misses you so much, thought about you ever day.

Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn't know what it is, there must be a reason why she's here in the first place. She lives because either she's not as brave as all the dead girls who've gone before her, or she's actually braver - it's hard to tell.

If you don't write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, "a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection".

I believe in staying open to possibility. What is the point of not believing, closing the door? Just leave it open, see what comes in.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

I am very interested in loyalty, even if the person to whom one is loyal is flawed, criminal, or otherwise in the wrong.

It is the kind of day that farmers, when there were still farmers, would have dreamed of. The sky is brilliant blue, the plants are newly green, the air as fresh and clean as though it has been washed, tumbled dry, and neatly folded the night before. It is the kind of day you never forget.

Is contentment death? Does one need to want in order to live?

He lay there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed.

I look. At the two-thirty spot I see a group of men watching two women kiss. I've never entirely understood why men like watching two women, or having two women at once. To me it just seems potentially confusing: four breasts, two whoosits, a lot of work to do ... I imagine blacking out from overload.

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

You talk with your feet.

Birthday parties make me nervous as hell. They're one of those things where you're forced to be happy. And even if you're totally depressed, you're got to pretend you're glad you were born, regardless of the fact that getting older means you're closer to dying.

Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve.

A guy rubbed against me," I say. "But I think he was just trying to get by. He rubbed me, then said sorry. It was the 'sorry' that made me uncomfortable. The rub was kind of interesting, but when he apologized I felt like a creep because I actually liked it.

The sadness Richard feels is so deep, so whole, it is as though he himself is sadness
that's what he held on to, that's what he kept for himself. He feels his failings, each like a claw digging in. He feels the limits of his personality, of his fear, of his ability to know himself, to know what he already knows.

Can I ask you, what is your relationship to God?"
"Limited," I say. "Limited with the exception of spontaneous prayer in times of distress.

To go there with her and explain in greatest detail the goings-on, to suggest to her that perhaps the sickness she experiences, the nauseating turn, is her own internal structure cramped by the rise of a desire heretofore unknown. I would also suggest that the impulse to 'lose one's lunch,' to spill such rich and fine fare as the 3 or 4 peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches consumed under the elm by the canoe pond only an hour before, is not so much a mark of aversion as a pronouncement of attraction, the making room for greater possibility.

It's not about you it's about human behavior. You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that's so shocking"
I nod "I guess so"
"What's shocking," Cheryl says, "is that it doesn't happen more often. What's shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what's shocking is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. So-am I surprised that some lady drowns her children and shoots herself? No. I think it's sad; I wish people had noticed that she was struggling, I wish she could have asked for help. What shocks me is how alone we all are

Even in the wicked, disgusting sweats he put on every day after work, he looked like a movie star. It isn't the kind of stuff a kid normally says about his dad, but it was true; there was just something about him, a weird kind of confidence that made everyone turn around and look.

My mind leaps to my theory about presidents - that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short - and don't quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise - I believe blow jobs prevent war.

I think you can write about what you know for about an hour and a half. Then you have to start bullshitting. So I say, lie to me and lie to me well. The only way to write well is to write accurately. Accuracy is not about the reader, it's about the subject and the character.

I made myself a Muenster-cheese sandwich, with lettuce, tomato, mustard, and mayo, and went up to my room. Ingredients are important.

I wanted to drive. I wanted to keep going, forward. I wanted to break out onto the highway, put my foot to the floor, turn on the radio, and sing along.

Given the circumstances, I think the rabbi did a very good job. What did you think?"
"It's my policy not to review funerals.

A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so to speak. While he was buried deep in a muff, some sharp thing slipped, and his prize patient, Mrs Mavis Gilette, woke to find a harpoon hole in her cheek and her lost licker languishing on the floor.

What does 'stuck' mean?" "It means I should make some big decision, I should do some enormous thing. And I can't do anything. I can't stand my life, and I can't change it." "Maybe it's not an enormous thing," he says. "Maybe you have to do one small thing and then another small thing.

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.