Shipstead's Quotes

#1. As a former ballerina, I can't put down Maggie Shipstead's new book, Astonish Me.

Caitlin Moran

#2. Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.

Maria Semple

#3. People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other.

Maggie Shipstead

#4. Any fool can hide, few can play.

Pete Townshend

#5. When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate's urge to cling, to close one's arms around a warm, soft object.

Maggie Shipstead

#6. What is the future you're creating right now?

Erwin McManus

#7. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.

Hugh Laurie

#8. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation.

Maggie Shipstead

#9. This was truly advanced WASP: how to comfort a wronged wife and mother without acknowledging any misdeeds done or embarrassment caused by loved ones.

Maggie Shipstead

#10. Those who are hardest to love need it the most

Pattie Mallette

#11. How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.

Maggie Shipstead

#12. She seems distracted, the way Joan feels when Harry is away on a school trip and part of her tries to follow him clairvoyantly through his day, probing the ether for any sign of distress.

Maggie Shipstead

#13. Simplicity lies concealed in this chaos, and it is only for us to discover it.

Augustin-Jean Fresnel

#14. On film sets, people get put down in public a lot.

David Warner

#15. We are all prone to the myth of the perfect stranger

Gordon Livingston

#16. I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I'm sort of done with that.

Laura Schlessinger

#17. Her throat is tight with fear. She is afraid of how this man, this stranger, has already changed the sensation of being alive. She is afraid he will slip away.

Maggie Shipstead

#18. A voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere.

Maggie Shipstead

#19. Culture of dependency leads to a life of slavery, being totally dependent upon government. And government dictates where they go in life.

Rafael Cruz

#20. Female friendship was one-tenth prevention and nine-tenths cleanup.

Maggie Shipstead

#21. Though she would never say so, Sandy holds the opinion that mothers who keep their figures have sacrificed less than mothers who have widened and softened.

Maggie Shipstead

#22. He finds low-level jealousy to be enlivening, pleasantly astringent.

Maggie Shipstead

#23. No number of compliments will convince her of anything, and one of Jacob's projects in their marriage is to wean her off perfectionism.

Maggie Shipstead

#24. What do I do?' she had asked Harry. 'What do I do now? Everything is ruined. You've ruined everything.' 'That you think that," he'd said, "is exactly the problem.

Maggie Shipstead

#25. Ordinarily, her love affairs are entered into skittishly, sometimes reluctantly. She doesn't dive into bed but flutters in like a wayward moth.

Maggie Shipstead

#26. All he asked of her was basic civility and an ounce of propriety, but she was like one of her sea creatures, goaded by the slightest disturbance into puffing up and flashing warning colors.

Shipstead, Maggie

#27. He let go, releasing her into a life of her own making.

Maggie Shipstead

#28. Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro