Stewart O'Nan Quotes

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole
like the world, or the person you loved.

He means people who let their faith take the place of their reason, people who believe this world is just a prelude to another, more glorious life. He means people like you. *

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.

The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead ... Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.

I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.

Theirs was a private language, not shared with the rest of the world, and so exempt from censure, sheer burlesque.

I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.

As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one.

Like a funeral, a birthday wasn't yours but for the people who loved you.

Her anger was the fuel she used to keep going.

She didn't want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar

You can't run from your roots.

All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they're true or invented, legend or fact.

A gift was what another person thought of you, and over the years he'd come to understand, by consensus, that his children saw him as someone who wore a tie to work, used power tools, played golf and drank scotch, which, while all true, seemed a superficial view of him. And yet when asked directly, he couldn't say what he wanted. Nothing.

It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don't fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were
their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven
and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the more fortunate clucking their tongues and counting their blessings, all the while knowing it was just a matter of time. She didn't need to be reminded that she was a single misstep from disaster, especially here, without Henry, surrounded by the survivors of an earlier life.

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get ... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He'd never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.

These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer
all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.

They should."
"Should be like a wood bee," she said.
It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience.

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The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

Getting sentimental," you say, but who are you fooling, you've always been.

It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.

There was mystery at the heart of any of marriage, secrets even people close to it would never know.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

My main question that I ask of my characters is, 'What does it feel like to be you? And how do you get through the day? Where do you find the hope and faith to endure getting through the days, and what are your days like?'

If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.

Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women
all people, finally
complicated?

Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' - which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was - losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.

He didn't like to fly
the noise and vibration gave him a headache
but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't
a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.

The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink--this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He'd survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they'd just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.

While she was away, he'd forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.

Come then, come with us, out into the night. Come now, America the lovesick, America the timid, the blessed, the educated, come stalk the dark backroads and stand outside the bright houses, calm as murderers in the yard, quiet as deer. Come, you slumberers, you lumps, arise from your legion of sleep and fly. Come, all you dreamers, all you zombies, all you monsters. What are you doing anyway, paying the bills, washing the dishes, waiting for the doorbell? Come on, take your keys, leave the bowl of candy on the porch, put on the suffocating mask of someone else and breathe. Be someone you don't love so much, for once. Listen: like the children, we only have one night.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.