“Keep making noise, I prayed, laughing. Bang drums. Clamor and ring bells for I cannot stand to hear the tired beating of this almost heart.”

#265 (2010s) #books #booksky #genxreader #readingcommunity #365books

“...you can't be ruined by things that others do to you but only by what you do to others.”

My seventh novel.

#264 (2010s) #books #booksky #genxreader #readingcommunity #365books

“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”

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“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

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“To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as your were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”

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“It's an old copy and it's starting to fall apart, but I hold on to my Handbook because nothing else makes promises like that around here, promises with these words burning inside them: honor, duty, and try.”

#260 (2010s) #books #booksky #genxreader #readingcommunity #365books

“You can't catch somebody doing something when they're not hiding.”

#259 (2010s) #books #booksky #genxreader #readingcommunity #365books

“I'll never stop caring. But the thing about caring is, it's inconvenient. Sometimes you've got to give when it makes no sense to at all. Sometimes you've got to give until it hurts.”

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“And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?”

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“Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you”

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“There was no center to the world. The curves of all our bells are cracked.”

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“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

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“Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that?”

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“That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.”

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My sixth novel, one of two set in northern Arizona.

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“He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.”

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“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”

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“If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn’t there a kind of terrible beauty in it?”

#248 (2010s) #books #booksky #genxreader #readingcommunity #365books

“Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?”

#246 (2010s) #books #booksky #genxreader #readingcommunity #365books