Amy Bloom Quotes

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.

You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.

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.

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.

In a true partnership, the kind worth striving for, the kind worth insisting on, and even, frankly, worth divorcing over, both people try to give as much or even a little more than they get. 'Deserves' is not the point. And 'owes' is certainly not the point. The point is to make the other person as happy as we can, because their happiness adds to ours. The point is -- in the right hands, everything that you give, you get.

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.

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.

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.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.

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 doesnt happen very often.

Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.

Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Aging is a chance to make what was good, great, and what was never so good, better...

Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.

You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.

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.

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.

To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we dont always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel.

All intimacy is rare-that's what makes it precious.

A blind man can see how much I love you

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

I wasn't surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein's store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.

I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.

they danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.

Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.

For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.

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.