Stewart O'Nan

“What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?”

“I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.”

“For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.”

“My main question that I ask of my characters is, 'What does it feel like to be you? And how do you get through the day? Where do you find the hope and faith to endure getting through the days, and what are your days like?'”

“I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.”

“If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.”

“You can't run from your roots.”

“As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.”

“Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.”

“Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.”

“Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.”

“I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.”

“I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed.”

“He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't--a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.”

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”

“There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He'd never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.”

“Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.”

“I've always been a big reader.”

“Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.”

“The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?”