Quotes from Amy Bloom

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.

I think the most important thing in the world is being brave. I'd rathe be brave than beautiful. Hell, I'd settle for acting brave.

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

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, that in the right hands, everything that you give, you get.

some people bounced back from a train wreck and some people couldn't get over a bee sting.

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

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

Love is not a pie.

And I surely cannot tell him that I'm no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I've been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.

You want the guy who'll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It's not about talking the talk,

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.

Dialogue is not conversation. It is conversation's greatest hits.

These were my people: the abandoned, the unloved, the phenomenally unlucky.

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

moving forward only because backward wasn't possible.

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 have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen.

I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn't, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn't love them.

She believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can't 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.

Every woman's body is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor's body is the landscape of my true home.

But in the morning everything can, and must, be seen. Daylight takes us; it peels us like fruit.

Oh, it's very hard, "Clare says, sitting down slowly and not too close. "Oh, I miss him so much. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know that I would be like this, that this is what happens when you love someone like that. I had no idea. No one says, There's no happy ending at all. No one says, If you could look ahead, you might want to stop now. I know, I know, I know I was lucky. I was luckier than anyone to have had what I had. I know now. I do, really.

We finished off a small pie and when we got home I washed the tomato sauce out of her hair, which I had expected, but also out of her underwear, which I think must be the sign that you have really, really enjoyed your lunch.

You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.