A.M. Homes Quotes

#1. She starts to cry. 'It's just so terrible,' she says.
'Which part?,' I ask.
'Being human.

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#2. Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.

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#3. Is contentment death? Does one need to want in order to live?

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#4. A fat old man has disturbed my day, coming to tell me that he has sold my childhood to a museum in Cincinnati.

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#5. Silly bug, fly on the wall, our first fight and how quickly we are over it. Of course I don't hate you, dearest, beloved, most cherished, I owe you everything.

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#6. I wanted to drive. I wanted to keep going, forward. I wanted to break out onto the highway, put my foot to the floor, turn on the radio, and sing along.

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#7. I nodded. It was his checklist. Every time we were together we went through this. He ran down his list of people, events, even actual objects that were in my life.

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#8. Even in the wicked, disgusting sweats he put on every day after work, he looked like a movie star. It isn't the kind of stuff a kid normally says about his dad, but it was true; there was just something about him, a weird kind of confidence that made everyone turn around and look.

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#9. If you don't write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

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#10. Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life ... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.

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#11. I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

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#12. My mind leaps to my theory about presidents - that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short - and don't quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise - I believe blow jobs prevent war.

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#13. Given the circumstances, I think the rabbi did a very good job. What did you think?"
"It's my policy not to review funerals.

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#14. They stood there, staring at each other, swelling up the whole room. I remember the sudden strange sensation that these were not my parents, these were not the same people I'd known last week.

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#15. I love my foot. If I had to send a part of myself to represent myself in some other country, or in some other way, I would amputate my foot and send it wrapped in white tissue on a silk-embroidered cushion. I would send my foot because it is me, more me than I'm willing to let on.

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#16. I think you can write about what you know for about an hour and a half. Then you have to start bullshitting. So I say, lie to me and lie to me well. The only way to write well is to write accurately. Accuracy is not about the reader, it's about the subject and the character.

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#17. Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve.

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#18. I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

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#19. I believe in staying open to possibility. What is the point of not believing, closing the door? Just leave it open, see what comes in.

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#20. Can I ask you, what is your relationship to God?"
"Limited," I say. "Limited with the exception of spontaneous prayer in times of distress.

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#21. There is a sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me. So glad to see you, I say, misses you so much, thought about you ever day.

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#22. You talk with your feet.

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#23. He looked at Richard and the donut with great intensity, as if this were the donut that would fix Richard, as if there were certain donuts that were better for certain ailments, as if a donut could have curative powers.

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#24. For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you've got to let go of the past.

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#25. The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,

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#26. You don't become a different person
you just learn to live with yourself
thats the hardest part.

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#27. Was there ever a time you thought - I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don't know why.

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#28. There are strangers, people we don't know, who care about is.

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#29. Alice, I hand you her name gently, suggesting that if you hold it, carefully as I do, pressed close to the heart, you might at the end of this understand how confusing the beating of two such similar hearts can be and how one finally had to stop.

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#30. Birthday parties make me nervous as hell. They're one of those things where you're forced to be happy. And even if you're totally depressed, you're got to pretend you're glad you were born, regardless of the fact that getting older means you're closer to dying.

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#31. I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They're four or five years long - that's not so bad. They're serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who's not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.

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#32. A guy rubbed against me," I say. "But I think he was just trying to get by. He rubbed me, then said sorry. It was the 'sorry' that made me uncomfortable. The rub was kind of interesting, but when he apologized I felt like a creep because I actually liked it.

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#33. Even though I thought I wouldn't - could never - I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one's self, like seeing one's self with a certain sense of remove.

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#34. I am very interested in loyalty, even if the person to whom one is loyal is flawed, criminal, or otherwise in the wrong.

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#35. I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.

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#36. I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

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#37. What does 'stuck' mean?" "It means I should make some big decision, I should do some enormous thing. And I can't do anything. I can't stand my life, and I can't change it." "Maybe it's not an enormous thing," he says. "Maybe you have to do one small thing and then another small thing.

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#38. It's a strange city ... filled with things that are not obvious.

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#39. Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

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#40. How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?

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#41. I'm trying to find some piece of myself that is truly me, a part that I would be willing to wear like a jewel around my neck.

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#42. People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.

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#43. You can't collect everything," Pat says, putting the dress in with the giveaways. "Life is not a hobby.

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#44. You are your own beginning. Every day, every hour, every minute, you start again. There is no point wishing you were someone else, you are who you are - start there.

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#45. Driving a Bentley to Target- only in LA does this make sense.

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#46. Anhil's coffee was hot, dark, full-flavored, perfect chasing the equally well-turned donut: golden brown, dense without being leaden, not too sweet.

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#47. She savors each bite: the meringue is perfect crispy brown on top, melts in the mouth; the lemon tart, custardy; the crust breaks away.

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#48. And I can't help but wonder, did George want to kill me too? I have no doubt that the only thing that stopped him was narcissism-to kill me was also to kill some part of himself, which might also explain why Nate and Ashley survived.

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#49. Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.

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#50. A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that's totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it's scary.

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#51. I don't want to be one of those women who says horrible things about her husband, but your father had no right to take the hammer. I had that hammer when we were still dating, and he damn well knew it.

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#52. I made myself a Muenster-cheese sandwich, with lettuce, tomato, mustard, and mayo, and went up to my room. Ingredients are important.

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#53. Normally I'm a movie freak. In fact, I am a movie. It's always me out there in a medium close-up. It's like there's a camera on me, trailing me, getting down every move. A long, slow, tracking shot of my life.

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#54. I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?

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#55. It annoys the hell out of me when people say, This is the kitchen, and this is the bathroom. What am I, Helen Keller? I mean, it's pretty obvious when you're in a kitchen and when you're not.

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#56. The strange days of summer. There is no here, no there, the days are incredibly still, the light is brightly muted--it's hard to know if that's the passing of the season or poor air quality.

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