Cathleen Schine Quotes

One of my favorite passages in 'Leaves of Grass,' that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is 'Mannahatta.'

Good TV is not just TV about good behavior.

I grew up reading books about heroic collies.

'Blue Nights' is a story of loss: simple, wrenching, inconsolable loss.

Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues.

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.

Everyone who moves to New York City has a book or movie or song that epitomizes the place for them. For me, it's 'The Cricket in Times Square', written by George Selden and illustrated by Garth Williams.

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?

Anyone who has read a Trollope novel knows that women did not have to wait until 1960 to feel trapped.

Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling. Life kicks you in the balls.

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.

'What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal' was thrilling in its light, deceptive tone, its subtle but irresistible momentum.

No, it's like you get an idea in your head ... no, it's more like you get and idea in your heart.

If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?

In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition. But her feelings for her daughter she recognized as inevitable, irresistable, and she reveled in them.

The night was mossy and hot...

I do not go out to dinner or to the movies with the neighbors, as I do with my friends. I don't make dates with them. I don't have to.

There are no moral lectures in 'Lookaway, Lookaway;' there aren't even any lessons. But there is passion. It is a work that hides its craft but never its beauty, that is ambitious but never pretentious, that does not sacrifice nuance for power or power for nuance.

The garden stretched out in a soft drift, colors jumbled any way, an unmade bed of red and yellow and pink. Then came the trees. Apple, plum, and the Japanese black pine.

Lines of gulls standing on glassy blue patches of wet sand.

As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK; a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace.

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

I do all my shopping on the Web. I do much of my research online. I have a blog, too. It is definitely a distraction. It is definitely a blessing. What blessing isn't a distraction, though?

Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square.

Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

'Use Me' is a wonderfully satisfying book.

They ate and picked sand from their chicken in the pink light.

Love letters lack taste. No restraint: falling off cliffs, going up in flames.

There had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.

I was one of those children they used to call 'readers.'

A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think.

It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire.

Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'