Top 100 Amy Bloom Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us.
Amy Bloom
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I find the 1940s very compelling. It is a very excitable period in the U.S. when, whether out of necessity or not, everybody was reinventing themselves.
Amy Bloom
#9. Moving forward only because backward wasn't possible.
Amy Bloom
#10. married. Edgar went back into the parlor
Amy Bloom
#11. The truth is I never think of any subject as taboo.
Amy Bloom
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
Amy Bloom
#15. Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.
Amy Bloom
#16. There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.
Amy Bloom
#17. Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.
Amy Bloom
#18. 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
#19. The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.
Amy Bloom
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say
Amy Bloom
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.
Amy Bloom
#28. You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.
Amy Bloom
#29. Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
Amy Bloom
#30. We live and we love the world, Lillian thinks, and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back.
Amy Bloom
#31. My father certainly believed that one could make a living outside of an office, as he did. And that if I didn't want to work for other people, there wasn't any reason why I had to. He conveyed that very strongly to my sister and I - that smart people can make their own livings.
Amy Bloom
#32. It was a festival of maternal love, all day, every day.
Amy Bloom
#33. My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious.
Amy Bloom
#34. I'm overall a big fan of President Obama.
Amy Bloom
#35. '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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Some people bounced back from a train wreck and some people couldn't get over a bee sting.
Amy Bloom
#39. 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
#40. 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.
Amy Bloom
#41. 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
#42. She suffered from the opposite of "phantom limb" syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.
Amy Bloom
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Aging is a chance to make what was good, great; and what was never so good, better.
Amy Bloom
#46. I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.
Amy Bloom
#47. People," he said. "They can't be underestimated.
Amy Bloom
#48. Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.
Amy Bloom
#49. The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.
Amy Bloom
#50. Whenever you see shrinks on television, they're so clearly written by patients. They're either idealized or they're demonized or they love their patients. All they ever think about is their patients.
Amy Bloom
#51. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. When I was a little girl, I thought I was Sydney Carton in Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' I don't think anyone else did.
Amy Bloom
#57. My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.
Amy Bloom
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity.
Amy Bloom
#61. I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.
Amy Bloom
#62. These were my people: the abandoned, the unloved, the phenomenally unlucky.
Amy Bloom
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
Amy Bloom
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Great sex is not a pleasant soak in the tub, with the scented candle burning. Great sex is more like a bomb exploding inside your right mind.
Amy Bloom
#69. 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
#70. The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.
Amy Bloom
#71. If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait.
Amy Bloom
#72. Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn't make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.
Amy Bloom
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often.
Amy Bloom
#77. I couldn't ask her anything. There wasn't a single question to which I'd get the answer I wanted.
Amy Bloom
#78. People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.
Amy Bloom
#79. I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.
Amy Bloom
#80. Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.
Amy Bloom
#81. 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
#82. The Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.)
Amy Bloom
#83. 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
#84. A blind man can see how much I love you
Amy Bloom
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. ...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
#92. 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
#93. [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
#94. I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.
Amy Bloom
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. They danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.
Amy Bloom
#98. There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
Amy Bloom
#99. 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
#100. 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
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