Amy Bloom

“Love is not a pie.”

“I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.”

“In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.”

“Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.”

“Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.”

“In a true partnership, the kind worth striving for, the kind worth insisting on and even, frankly, worth divorcing over, both people try to give as much or even a little more than they get. "Deserves" is not the point. And "owes" is certainly not the point. The point is to make the other person as happy as we can, because their happiness adds to ours. The point is, that in the right hands, everything that you give, you get.”

“And why is Saint Paula a Saint? She dumps her four kids at a convent. She runs off to Hajira with Saint Jerome. How is that a saint?You’ve got shitty mothers all over America who would love to dump their kids and travel.”

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”

“Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”

“[...] und sie hört, wie er sich in sein Doppelbett legt, auf seine Seite, da er nicht auf Helens Seite schlafen kann, wo er heimlich drei ihrer bestickten Kissen arrangiert hat und sich zum Schlafen ihnen zuwendet, ein Arm um das mittlere Kissen gelegt, den anderen unter dem Kopf, wobei seine Hand wie zum Schutz auf seiner Stirn ruht.”

“We finished off a small pie and when we got home I washed the tomato sauce out of her hair, which I had expected, but also out of her underwear, which I think must be the sign that you have really, really enjoyed your lunch.”

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”

“I think the most important thing in the world is being brave. I'd rathe be brave than beautiful. Hell, I'd settle for acting brave. ”

“they danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.”

“The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”

“I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.”

“Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.”

“You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.”

“Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa. ”

“Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.”

“The knock-kneed brown moose, a tired group of ten, yards ahead of her for the last three days, comfort her too. It's like following a pack of grandfathers, their large, weary eyes, red lids sagging, their gray muzzles, puckered as if the world is almost done with them but not quite yet.”

“I wasn't surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein's store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.”

“Surely, somewhere in the back of Bulfinch, in a part Lillian had not gotten to, there is an obscure (abstruse, arcane, shadowy, and even hidden) version of Proserpine in he Underworld in which a tired Jewish Ceres schleps through the outskirts of Tartarus, an ugly village of tired whores who must double as laundresses and barbers, a couple of saloons, a nearly empty five-and-dime, and people too poor to pull up stakes. In this version, Ceres looks all over town for her Proserpine, who crossed the River Cyane in a pretty sailboat with Pluto, having had the good sense to come to an understanding with the king early on. Pluto and Proserpine picnic in a charming park, twinkling lights overhead and handsome wide benches like the ones in Central Park. When Ceres comes, tripping a little on her hem as she walks through the soft grass, muttering and trying to yank Proserpine to her feet so they can start the long trip home to Enna and daylight (which has lost much of its luster, now that Proserpine is queen of all she surveys), the girl does not jump up at the sight of her mother, but takes her time handing out the sandwiches and pours cups of sweetened tea for the three of them. She lays a nicely ironed napkin in her lap and another in the lap of her new husband, the king. Proserpine does not eat the pomegranate seeds by mistake, or in a moment of desperate hunger, or fright, or misunderstanding. She takes the pomegranate slice out of her husband’s dark and glittering hand and pulls the seeds into her open, laughing mouth; she eats only six seeds because her mother knocks it out of her hand before she can swallow the whole sparkling red cluster. “We have to get home,” Ceres says. “I am home,” her daughter says.”

“Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.”

“There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.”