Top 100 Quotes About Leavitt
#1. I have long admired Caroline Leavitt's probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.
Dan Chaon
#2. Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble's breakthroughs possible.
Bill Bryson
#3. A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.
Christopher Bram
#4. Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done." -David Leavitt, "Partition," _The Indian Clerk_
David Leavitt
#8. I'm trying to abandon the present, but I don't even have the skills to master the past.
Lindsey Leavitt
#9. All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.
Caroline Leavitt
#10. I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.
Caroline Leavitt
#11. A title means marketing. It means that company's coming soon, and you'd better get out the Christmas lights so they don't miss your house.
Caroline Leavitt
#12. People laugh because they're nervous, or to cover up tension, or to flirt, or because there's some instant applause meter in their head telling them that it's the socially acceptable thing to do. Genuine laughter, I don't even think that happens daily.
Lindsey Leavitt
#13. E-readers are changing the way we read, and the author is now required to get out there and be a kind of showman, an unlikely role for introspective people used to working in their pajamas!
Caroline Leavitt
#14. Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.
Caroline Leavitt
#15. Just because you see something doesn't mean it's really there.
Martine Leavitt
#16. I call Algonquin Books 'the gods and goddesses of publishing.' Not only did they give me a career, they care deeply about every writer in their flock.
Caroline Leavitt
#17. Each man, when he dies, sees the landscape of his own soul.
Martine Leavitt
#18. Had I truly thought I would not die when he kissed me? But I did. For a moment the breath and life went out of me and there was no time and no tomorrow but only my lips against his.
Martine Leavitt
#20. In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.
David Leavitt
#21. I was a bookworm who aced every test - until third grade, when my teacher handed out a pop quiz about Jesus and the Apostles.
Caroline Leavitt
#22. He's going to want an explanation," I say.
"An explanation? You don't owe him anything. If you don't want to talk to him, don't. If you want to yell at him, do. If you want to slash his tires - "
"Ginnie."
"I was going to say don't. Or do. Whatever helps.
Lindsey Leavitt
#23. I absolutely want and prize and love and revere every single media review I get, but if I got 50 reviews from major newspapers and one review from Amazon, I still would feel a little weird: 'What's going on? Why aren't people responding?'
Caroline Leavitt
#24. I hate to say it, but Mom is right. You can't stay mad in Disneyland.
Lindsey Leavitt
#25. I think the Internet has made things a lot easier. Twitter and Facebook let you really connect to your readers effortlessly!
Caroline Leavitt
#28. When self-publishing started, it was mostly people who really couldn't write. And they just wanted to get their book out, and they couldn't get traditional deals.
Caroline Leavitt
#30. Everything they've said is tainted now. Every day was a lie.
Lindsey Leavitt
#31. People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul - satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.
Robert Keith Leavitt
#32. You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door.
David Leavitt
#33. I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it's cheaper - sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you're going to be mad.
Caroline Leavitt
#34. You could love many people in your life. Maybe love didn't die even when a person did, but that didn't mean there might not be room for someone else in your heart.
Caroline Leavitt
#35. These are the best reasons to do anything in life. People who say things like this are the kind of people who change the world. Who prevent the world from ending. Or at least they can change the inner world of a reader and that is a sacred power.
Martine Leavitt
#36. I think it's crucial to live, play and work passionately. I'm inspired by my husband, my son and the sense of possibility in the world.
Caroline Leavitt
#37. I cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast.
Caroline Leavitt
#38. She knew she had never been truly alive until she met him, and never so happy and content with her lot until she was touched by the sorrow of him.
Martine Leavitt
#39. While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.
Caroline Leavitt
#40. I always think that in a big city, anything is possible, including reinventing yourself.
Caroline Leavitt
#41. We're all messed up," I said. "I think life is just about finding the right people to be messed up with.
Lindsey Leavitt
#42. Papa loves you with a dying and infernal love," the youngest girl said.
"Undying," the eldest girl corrected. "And eternal.
Martine Leavitt
#43. I always write about the things that haunt me, the questions I have.
Caroline Leavitt
#44. I tell myself that some names can be mistakes, like Mxyplyzyk, a store in New York that lost customers because few could spell its name to look up the address. I tell myself that lots of writers agonize over titles, and often get them wrong at first.
Caroline Leavitt
#45. Living to an extraordinary age, she mourned them all equally as she buried her husband and, one by one, her children. In this suffering she found the best sort of perfection
the kind that never demands it of others.
Martine Leavitt
#46. I'm sorry I kissed you."
"Don't apologize!"
"All right. Sorry."
"You don't get all the blame. I was here too, you know. Do you think I just run around kissing any boy who drags me into a toolshed?"
"No." Oliver's mouth twitches. "Do you have a lot of boys dragging you into toolsheds?
Lindsey Leavitt
#47. Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.
Caroline Leavitt
#48. I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.
David Leavitt
#49. A true friend gives you exactly what you need, even if she has no idea why you need it.
Lindsey Leavitt
#50. Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.
David Leavitt
#52. I've figured out there's a difference between the meaning of the word 'real' and the meaning of the word 'true.
Martine Leavitt
#53. When a flawlessly dressed woman steps out of an iridescent bubble and wants to know, like NOW if you'd like to become a substitute princess, do you:
a) run
b) faint
c) say yes!
Lindsey Leavitt
#54. They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.
David Leavitt
#55. Housewives of the 1950s were supposed to create show-stopping meals every night for their hard-working husbands.
Caroline Leavitt
#57. Never be with anyone you couldn't imagine yourself being able to live without.
Caroline Leavitt
#59. I like to lie sometimes. You should know that about me.
Lindsey Leavitt
#60. I think my stubbornness has served me well. I just knew at an early age what I wanted to do and I was determined to be able to make it happen, no matter how long it took.
Caroline Leavitt
#61. 'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull.
David Leavitt
#62. I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'
Caroline Leavitt
#63. I'm a big believer in quantum physics, which says that the universe is more incredible and mysterious than any of us can imagine, which is my way of saying, 'Anything is possible, including angels.'
Caroline Leavitt
#64. Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.
Caroline Leavitt
#65. Christmas was over. It had passed, as usual, in a fever of generosities, and left an aftertaste of swindle in its wake. "Anticippointment" Pamela said ... and there was in that invented word all the regret and resignation that forty-seven years of Christmases had built up in her.
David Leavitt
#66. I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.
David Leavitt
#67. Do what you love. Live fearlessly and take risks. Don't take no for an answer from anyone - go ahead and prove the naysayers wrong. Believe that anything can be possible.
Caroline Leavitt
#68. When you love what you do, it stops seeming like work and instead becomes necessity.
Caroline Leavitt
#70. Right. Like I have any plans of hanging out with Vampire Boy ever again. Schedule it in right after my lunch date with Lord Voldemort.
Lindsey Leavitt
#71. I let out a sigh, hoping it releases some of the bad karma I just incurred from being so heinous. (Sean Griswold's Head)
Lindsey Leavitt
#73. He loops his arm over my shoulder and we watch the waves in silence. We've had so many silences between us these last few months, bitter ones, loaded ones, empty ones, and hurtful ones. This one is perfect. It says things that words can't.
Lindsey Leavitt
#74. And so he did his endless work,' I continued quietly, 'without feeling, without pity, without rest, for to open his heart to these would be to open his heart to his loneliness and longing and that was beyond bearing.
Martine Leavitt
#75. We cling to hierarchies because our place in a hierarchy is, rightly or wrongly, a major indicator of our social worth.
Harold Leavitt
#76. When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.
David Leavitt
#77. When I'm done, I contemplate lying down in the middle of the road to let a car finish me off. I'm already half-dead.
Lindsey Leavitt
#78. Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
Caroline Leavitt
#79. I have observed that you treat a man as an old garment to be taken apart and stitched again. Perhaps you could think of him as good cloth, rich fabric that wants only to be embroidered upon. And perhaps, if you will do that, you will see that you love Tailor yourself.
Martine Leavitt
#80. My mother makes up for all shortcomings because she birthed Ginnie. I might not have loads of friends, but Ginnie is enough. More than enough.
Lindsey Leavitt
#81. Indie bookstores love writers as much as they love readers, and there is something about a community store, where you walk in, you feel known, and the delight in books is just infectious.
Caroline Leavitt
#82. You can't trust a guy showing off more cleavage than you.
Lindsey Leavitt
#83. I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!
Caroline Leavitt
#84. We mean you don't love any men," Gretta said in her even, matter-of-fact voice.
"You know very well that I adore all men," I said. "I have always thought them to be the dearest of things.
Martine Leavitt
#86. The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.
David Leavitt
#87. I want to live in a world free of air talkers and technological affairs. Is that too much to ask? My
Lindsey Leavitt
#88. Their relationship isn't perfect in a lot of ways, bit it's something real. And real should probably be the goal, not perfection. Every relationship is flawed; you just have to figure out how to make it work. Keep trying.
Lindsey Leavitt
#89. There have been years where I've had to take a real job and I wrote during slow times and lunches. I think never forgetting how lucky I am to be able to do something I love has really fueled me.
Caroline Leavitt
#91. It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
David Leavitt
#92. If a kid disappears, now there's Amber Alerts: they know this-this-this. In the '50s, we kids wandered around. Nobody knew what you were doing.
Caroline Leavitt
#93. Which is worse, she thinks, waiting for the sting, or the sting itself?
Caroline Leavitt
#94. I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.
Caroline Leavitt
#95. I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.
Caroline Leavitt
#97. Remember that you don't have to forget what happened, but you can forget the pain.
Lindsey Leavitt
#98. A haunting, harrowing punch to the heart, Among the Missing is flat-out brilliant. About the secrets we keep, the lives we are desperate to live, and the chances we miss, it's a psychological dazzler. Truly, one of my favorite books of this year-or any year.
Caroline Leavitt
