Amy Bloom

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.

Love at first sight is easy to understand

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.

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.

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

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

Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.

I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.

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

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.

The German deli was run by a distant cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Great Neck Jews loved the place; they flocked to Kuch's. They said to one another, What a character he is, Otto, strictly old country, I'm telling you. Gus didn't think that Negroes would rush to shop in a store run by some retired slave owner, eager to share memories of fun times on the plantation, praising Massa's old-fashioned Mississippi charm. Jews were still chasing that absurd, wishful feather. Eventually, Jews would become like everybody else. They'd elevate small grievances; they'd cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue.

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

Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it's more horseshit.

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'__f they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.

She believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can__ even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and binding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.