Amy Bloom Quotes

#1. Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it's more horseshit.

Amy Bloom

#2. Love is not a pie.

Amy Bloom

#3. I met Jay Jonhson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team.

Amy Bloom

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

Amy Bloom

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

Amy Bloom

#6. Boundaries are the lines we draw that mark off our autonomy and that of other people, that protect our privacy and that of others. Boundaries allow for intimate connection without dissolving or losing one's sense of self.

Amy Bloom

#7. You want the guy who'll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It's not about talking the talk,

Amy Bloom

#8. And I surely cannot tell him that I'm no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I've been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.

Amy Bloom

#9. You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.

Amy Bloom

#10. My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.

Amy Bloom

#11. My greatest surprise was that so much of what we think is common sense is just prejudice, and so much of what we think is scientific fact is about as scientific as the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.

Amy Bloom

#12. I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.

Amy Bloom

#13. 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.

Amy Bloom

#14. 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.

Amy Bloom

#15. My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

Amy Bloom

#16. She believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can't even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and binding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.

Amy Bloom

#17. I've written the best work I know how. And I'm appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work - and that's pretty much the end of that.

Amy Bloom

#18. He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said - women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.

Amy Bloom

#19. I don't think writers really choose their subjects. I think the subjects, the topics, the themes, choose us, and then we make the most of what we have. For Trollope, society; for Roth, Jews. For me, apparently, love. Why hide it?

Amy Bloom

#20. I do my business in the morning, and then at 2 P.M., I write fiction for the rest of the day. I like my husband, so I don't work at weekends.

Amy Bloom

#21. 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.

Amy Bloom

#22. There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'

Amy Bloom

#23. They danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.

Amy Bloom

#24. I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has.

Amy Bloom

#25. And sometimes we cling because the memory is so painful that we can't stop visiting it and hoping to make it come out differently. The risk of letting go is that we have to confront our own selves and our own possibilities.

Amy Bloom

#26. I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.

Amy Bloom

#27. [He] was what people called a man's man. He fixed things and he had a deep laugh. He looked like he could carry you out of a burning building and he looked like the kind of man who would go back in to get your poodle. And even though he made fun of his own looks [...], I liked his face.

Amy Bloom

#28. Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.

Amy Bloom

#29. ...as he cannot sleep on Helen's side, which is where he has secretly arranged three of her embroidered pillows, and sleeps facing them, one arm around the middle pillow, the other curled under his head, his hand resting on his brow as if for protection.

Amy Bloom

#30. As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being.

Amy Bloom

#31. It takes something to get married: nerve, hope, a strong desire to make a certain statement - and it takes something to stay married: more hope, determination, a sense of humor, and needs that are best met by being in a pair.

Amy Bloom

#32. Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting.

Amy Bloom

#33. My father quoted everyone, from Shakespeare to Emerson, on the subject of destiny, and then he'd point out that except for the Greeks, everyone agreed: The stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way.

Amy Bloom

#34. I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment.

Amy Bloom

#35. A blind man can see how much I love you

Amy Bloom

#36. I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with.

Amy Bloom

#37. The Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.)

Amy Bloom

#38. I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.

Amy Bloom

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

Amy Bloom

#40. People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.

Amy Bloom

#41. I couldn't ask her anything. There wasn't a single question to which I'd get the answer I wanted.

Amy Bloom

#42. Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.

Amy Bloom

#43. Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.

Amy Bloom

#44. The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say

Amy Bloom

#45. I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.

Amy Bloom

#46. 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.

Amy Bloom

#47. She didn't believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.

Amy Bloom

#48. I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn't, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn't love them.

Amy Bloom

#49. She didn't understand a thing about Catholics. It's all praise Mary, she said, women doing all the hard work and letting men run the church and calling the shots for everyone.

Amy Bloom

#50. Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.

Amy Bloom

#51. There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Amy Bloom

#52. Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

Amy Bloom

#53. Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living.

Amy Bloom

#54. 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.

Amy Bloom

#55. Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it's a story that's on a stage, but there's a different sort of tension that appears on stage - you get to see your characters in a different way - like with lights.

Amy Bloom

#56. The truth is I never think of any subject as taboo.

Amy Bloom

#57. married. Edgar went back into the parlor

Amy Bloom

#58. Moving forward only because backward wasn't possible.

Amy Bloom

#59. She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them.

Amy Bloom

#60. My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.

Amy Bloom

#61. I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around.

Amy Bloom

#62. Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us.

Amy Bloom

#63. 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.

Amy Bloom

#64. My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too.

Amy Bloom

#65. Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.

Amy Bloom

#66. The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

Amy Bloom

#67. People," he said. "They can't be underestimated.

Amy Bloom

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

Amy Bloom

#69. Aging is a chance to make what was good, great; and what was never so good, better.

Amy Bloom

#70. I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.

Amy Bloom

#71. I do have a sister. I have never written much about sisters before. I am very close to my sister, but, maybe, because we are very close, it never occurred to me to write about her.

Amy Bloom

#72. She suffered from the opposite of "phantom limb" syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.

Amy Bloom

#73. It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It's not because anyone in their right mind says, 'You know, what's the most fascinating thing in the world?' It's because you need something new that happens every week in a frame.

Amy Bloom

#74. The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's
sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of
ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior.

Amy Bloom

#75. Some people bounced back from a train wreck and some people couldn't get over a bee sting.

Amy Bloom

#76. So we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.

Amy Bloom

#77. Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can't make friends with grief, you've got to at least make way for it.

Amy Bloom

#78. 'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work.

Amy Bloom

#79. I'm overall a big fan of President Obama.

Amy Bloom

#80. My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious.

Amy Bloom

#81. We live and we love the world, Lillian thinks, and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back.

Amy Bloom

#82. Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Amy Bloom

#83. You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.

Amy Bloom

#84. I find my readers to be very smart, and there is no reason to write dumb.

Amy Bloom

#85. For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

Amy Bloom

#86. 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.

Amy Bloom

#87. Clare is good, spiky company, and she is the very best companion to have in a bad situation. Trouble brings out the cheer beneath her darkness, unlike everyday life, which tends to have the opposite effect

Amy Bloom

#88. I wish I'd thrown my arms around Gus's neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.

Amy Bloom

#89. All intimacy is rare-that's what makes it precious.

Amy Bloom

#90. My grandmother tended to divide life into 'nice' and 'not so nice.' Life in America, her apartment, her grandchildren: 'nice'; life before 1915: 'not so nice.' That's all I heard.

Amy Bloom

#91. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

Amy Bloom

#92. My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

Amy Bloom

#93. If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

Amy Bloom

#94. Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.

Amy Bloom

#95. My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

Amy Bloom

#96. We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating.

Amy Bloom

#97. Dialogue is not conversation. It is conversation's greatest hits.

Amy Bloom

#98. I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose - and people who aren't related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary.

Amy Bloom

#99. 'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.

Amy Bloom

#100. You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.

Amy Bloom