Words matter. These are the best Amity Gaige Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
For several years before I began ‘The Folded World,’ I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.
I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.
To me, self-esteem is not self-love. It is self-acknowledgment, as in recognizing and accepting who you are.
Reading while I’m writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.
I was born on an even keel. Family lore says I never cried, even at birth. I felt at ease on earth, in the right place. And like many children, I took comfort in life’s regularity: Every few days it rained, the school bus came and went, and my parents were rooted in their union.
I think I have a very American desire and willingness to divulge everything. I would divulge more if I didn’t know it wasn’t smart.
In the name of ‘mutual assistance,’ the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.
Let’s admit it; the only use for complaining is to make people laugh.
Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!
There would be times when I got so much work that I didn’t have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.
Self-esteem comes quietly, like the truth.
I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that’s wonderful. And it’s also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don’t understand.
‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.
It’s dangerous to accept crisis as your baseline. It gets harder and harder to see the anti-crises that are so requisite to happiness: the quiet times, the crucial pauses – like those in a poem.
I think marriage and family keeps being written about because that’s where we keep our reputations with ourselves – I mean, we can’t quite slip the truths we reveal about ourselves at home.
I wanted – and still want – to tell my mother’s story. She fled Stalin’s army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.
I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it’s really true, then I think it’s a mistake.
When you feel the need to moan and groan, laugh with woeful recognition and eat flaky pastries. If you hear yourself taking the art of complaining a little too seriously, ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish, exactly.
If you could literally ‘rid’ yourself of your problems by voicing them, I’d be all for it. But since that isn’t so, why not reserve the spoken word for functional interactions and witticisms, if not declarations of love?
I certainly want people to like my writing, but I know that if I write with the intention of trying to please people, the writing will not be good because it will not be authentic. So, ironically, I have to be willing to write something strange or unlovable in order to write anything truly good.
Reading ‘Blood Will Out,’ one begins to understand how so many people were duped by Clark Rockefeller. All the imposter needs is some kind of initial agreement that he is who he says he is; thereafter, consensus builds via a network of human relationships.
I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence.
Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other – the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.
I loved Madeleine L’Engle as a child – ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’
Don’t let anyone tell you there’s only one way to write.
