Leni Zumas Quotes

But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve.

So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.

Angry sea," people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don't have names for.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?'

A few faces smile, uneasy.

Even louder: 'How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?

The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn't suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do.

Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man's genetic material?

The comparing mind is a despairing mind.

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.