Quotes About Zink

#1. Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

Jonathan Franzen

#2. Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.

Michelle Zink

#3. Still, experience has taught me that knowing one's enemy is key to winning any battle.

Michelle Zink

#4. As a speller he was adrift in a no-man's-land between phonetic and dyslexic.

Nell Zink

#5. I've begun to wonder if that's all we really need. Just one person who knows us truly. One person who knows the darkness that lies within and believes in us anyway.

Michelle Zink

#6. I really like writing in English, and it's the best job I've ever had.

Nell Zink

#7. You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour.

Nell Zink

#8. There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement.

Nell Zink

#9. As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime. The

Nell Zink

#10. I avoid looking at the clock, fearing the slow passing of time that will only seem slower if I watch its progress.

Michelle Zink

#11. For jobs and men, it's a seller's market. There are no other fish in the sea.

Nell Zink

#12. As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything.

Nell Zink

#13. Twee," the wallcreeper remarked. "Twee!

Nell Zink

#14. I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him.

Nell Zink

#15. Some things must be done however much we wish to avoid them.

Michelle Zink

#16. From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, "Twee.

Nell Zink

#17. She was young the way an actual young person is young.

Nell Zink

#18. Why shouldn't loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare?

Nell Zink

#19. (why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money)

Nell Zink

#20. I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

Nell Zink

#21. What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world? Lee

Nell Zink

#22. She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.

Nell Zink

#23. I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover.

Nell Zink

#24. I love you anyway, Lia," he calls after me. "Until time tells, I mean."
I turn to him and smile, loving him more in this moment than any other. "Until time tells, then, Henry, and beyond. I love you as well.

Michelle Zink

#25. There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition.

Nell Zink

#26. Lee explained to her that art for art's sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can't be living a life driven by need and desire.

Nell Zink

#27. I must confess I will miss your ... proximity when jumping together.'
'Well,' she said, answering his smile with one of her own.
'There's always sickle training in the ballroom.'
'That there is.

Michelle Zink

#28. Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric "becoming a woman," all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep.

Nell Zink

#29. You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois.

Nell Zink

#30. I'm not very good with anything physical ... ' she began as they turned down a hallway she had never seen.
He flashed her a grin as they walked.
'I find that hard to believe.'
She caught the innuendo in his voice and felt a blush creep to her cheeks.
'You know what I mean.

Michelle Zink

#31. Keeper scum."
"That's offensive coming from a wraith. I think I'm going to have to defend my honor.

Michelle Zink

#32. But I know that in order to get to the end of a thing, one must start at the beginning.

Michelle Zink

#33. If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.

Nell Zink

#34. I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.

Nell Zink

#35. It's a digital e-cigarette." "What's digital about it?" "You hold it in your fingers, like this." "I'm serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you're smoking it?" "I don't think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity.

Nell Zink

#36. You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.

Nell Zink

#37. And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans

Nell Zink

#38. College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life - literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain.

Nell Zink

#39. But I learned long ago that it does no good to think too far into the future. There is only here. Only now.

Michelle Zink

#40. If I'd had a nickel for every time Rachel had said whatever, we wouldn't have had to steal Warren Fairchild's gold.

Michelle Zink

#41. People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

Nell Zink

#42. To find the books end,
cross the ancient wood to the mystic isle.
Until then, prepare yourself
for the coming battle ...
AND TRUST NO ONE.

Michelle Zink

#43. Whether or not Darius is pleased doesn't matter.' Griffin's voice took on a hard edge, and for a moment, he almost sounded like his brother. 'He has what he needs. He always has. Now ... ' he began.
'Yes?' she prompted.
'I need you,' he said.

Michelle Zink

#44. Time - and all the events held therein - plays out as it must. We cannot impose our will on it. The only true measure of strength is our ability to bear that which time demands.

Michelle Zink

#45. My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.

Nell Zink

#46. In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow.

Nell Zink

#47. Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there's never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think.

Nell Zink

#48. If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up. Nobody

Nell Zink

#49. Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant.

Nell Zink

#50. There is no ladylike way to tell him to push all he wants, that his mouth and body on mine are the only things keeping me from losing my hold on a reality I never questioned until these past days.

Michelle Zink

#51. Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile.

Nell Zink

#52. I shake my head. "Remember, Mother. There are no mistakes."
She smiles through her tears, leaning in to kiss my cheek "No mistakes, my angel.

Michelle Zink

#53. She didn't know why it should seem strange that Darius fancied someone, but even as little as she knew him, it already seemed improbable, though not as improbable as someone fancying him in return.

Michelle Zink

#54. Don't you see, Helen? There would be no life for me now without you in it."
He covered her hand with his own, bringing it to his lips.
"I need to know that you're mine. That I alone have your heart.

Michelle Zink

#55. She appreciated his protection, of course, but she was not sure if she wanted to be looked at ... as if she were fragile. A thing to hold gingerly, as one holds a delicate rose, careful not to bump its silken petals lest they should spill to the floor.

Michelle Zink

#56. What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.

Nell Zink

#57. I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

Nell Zink

#58. The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.

Nell Zink

#59. I recall his somber eyes during that last, private conversation. His eyes and his words, far too wise for a boy of ten: only time will tell, Lia.
In the end, I suppose it will.

Michelle Zink

#60. So many men, so little parking.

Nell Zink

#61. I have known many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults.

Nell Zink

#62. The blackness that smothers me is total, and in the moment before everything falls away, I know what it feels like to be dead.

Michelle Zink

#63. She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug's ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac.

Nell Zink

#64. Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home.

Nell Zink

#65. Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.

Nell Zink

#66. Her soul was as cold as the air that bit through London in winter, her grief a shadow to the vengeance ...

Michelle Zink

#67. When the past is hard to explain, it's best to concentrate on the future.

Nell Zink

#68. Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.

Nell Zink

#69. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

Nell Zink

#70. I am not my mother. I love her, but I am not her.

Michelle Zink

#71. It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz.

Nell Zink

#72. The girl looked up, blinking, a far-off expression in here eyes. I recognized it, understood the shock of realizing the world inside your book wasn't real. Even worse, you were in another world entirely and no one understood - or even cared - that you preferred the one living on the page.

Michelle Zink

#73. He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.

Nell Zink

#74. The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.

Nell Zink

#75. Alice will always be a beautiful mystery. It is one I am content not to solve.I can love her now in her lovely darkness. -Amalia Milthorpe

Michelle Zink

#76. (It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.)

Nell Zink

#77. Excuse me," Helen interrupted. "Did you say sewage tunnels?"
Darius grinned. "That I did, Princess.

Michelle Zink

#78. They should build a monument," Cary said. "All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public.

Nell Zink

#79. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.

Nell Zink

#80. Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret.

Nell Zink

#81. I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices? I thought. Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana - not that three isn't enough, but that the three on offer aren't enough to sustain a marriage?

Nell Zink

#82. it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.

Nell Zink

#83. Books never lied to me, never betrayed me, never left me alone and wondering what was wrong with me.

Michelle Zink

#84. The day is like a diamond, all beautiful warmth on the outside but without any heat to accompany it.

Michelle Zink

#85. I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

Nell Zink

#86. the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters.

Nell Zink

#87. then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand

Nell Zink