Kathleen Rooney Quotes

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I'd made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds.

Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For

I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.

New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is.

I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.

Not to give too big of a spoiler, but I never find myself thinking, for example, Oh, remember that crazy time I stumbled on that closeted Republican candidate's sex tape?

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.

A lot of these love notes seem to be from well-read and lovesick young men with literary aspirations. That type doesn't interest me in the least. They say they only have eyes for gazing at you and then end up gazing right back at their navels.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith "politeness." That's part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity - one's own and others' - but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed." "I remember that," I say. And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it - calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable - though it was Johnson who finally signed it.

If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.

This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objectives. If one knocks oneself out of one's routine- and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs- then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is

Maybe I'll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That

caelum, non animum mutant, for instance - climate may change, but not character - and

But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.

That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within

I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.

In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction.

Here's some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you've made before you look askance at somebody else's." I

committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable. I

Whenever "everyone" is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I

Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving. ... Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing.

If one were HAPPY, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.

The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

this, they've never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don't count anymore. I think it's small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

Time only goes in that one direction.

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.