Amity Gaige Quotes

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

I researched children's rights, divorce law, and parental kidnapping. Millions of children and parents are touched by the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with the human heart.

I was born on an even keel. Family lore says I never cried, even at birth. I felt at ease on earth, in the right place. And like many children, I took comfort in life's regularity: Every few days it rained, the school bus came and went, and my parents were rooted in their union.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

Reading 'Blood Will Out,' one begins to understand how so many people were duped by Clark Rockefeller. All the imposter needs is some kind of initial agreement that he is who he says he is; thereafter, consensus builds via a network of human relationships.

Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.

When you feel the need to moan and groan, laugh with woeful recognition and eat flaky pastries. If you hear yourself taking the art of complaining a little too seriously, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish, exactly.

For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.

Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.

Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage-- he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher-- he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation.

Childhood is supposed to be happy, and if you can't remember yours with any happiness, what hope have you later, when life starts handing you fresh grief?

It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

I certainly want people to like my writing, but I know that if I write with the intention of trying to please people, the writing will not be good because it will not be authentic. So, ironically, I have to be willing to write something strange or unlovable in order to write anything truly good.

Until I sailed, I never would have known that children could be so brave. Which is not to say they did not whine at sea, that they did not cry at the worst times, or need their crusts cut just so, but as it turned out, they had a deep capacity for witness. In a way that I could not, they became the sea, they became the swamp. Their experience was total, without footnote. That day in the swamp, I felt unaccountably happy for them, and for myself as a child, because I knew that I must have been that way once too. I remembered the loss of childhood too well. But I often forgot the long years it was mine.

I think marriage and family keeps being written about because that's where we keep our reputations with ourselves - I mean, we can't quite slip the truths we reveal about ourselves at home.

It's dangerous to accept crisis as your baseline. It gets harder and harder to see the anti-crises that are so requisite to happiness: the quiet times, the crucial pauses - like those in a poem.

I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.

I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence.

There would be times when I got so much work that I didn't have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.

I'm not "depressed," she said. Besides, I hate that word. OK, what should we call it? She fluffed the pillow behind her back, indignant. I'm very faithful to my problems.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

I think I have a very American desire and willingness to divulge everything. I would divulge more if I didn't know it wasn't smart.

Parenthood is a psychic sweat lodge: enter into it only if you are ready to have your own secreted toxins running into your eyes. Few people are prepared for its power - women or men.

I loved Madeleine L'Engle as a child - 'A Wrinkle in Time.'

Don't let anyone tell you there's only one way to write.

I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that's wonderful. And it's also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don't understand.

Be happy. Decide to be happy. If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you're happy or not, so why wait for permission? And did it really matter if you had been deeply unhappy in your past? Who but you remembered that?