Quotes from Amy Bloom

love was like some shabby old footstool. Everyone used it without wanting it and no one ever gave it a moment's thought.

she talked until she was hoarse about the basic rights of every citizen: equal education, equal pay, equal representation, and equal participation. Everyone quoted her and lots of people hated her,

Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living.

I don't want to end my life, he said, but I'd rather end it while I am still myself, rather than become less and less of a person.

The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.) The country had a leader. Hired girls had

William snorts and wakes up, his hair wild and waving like silver palm fronds. He looks like he might have had a bad dream, and Clare smiles to comfort him. He looks at her as if he's never seen her, or never seen her like this, which isn't so;he's seen her a hundred times just like this, seated across from him deep in thought,flinging her legs over the arm of the chair to get comfortable. "Oh,here you are",he says.

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.

Every couple has the same five arguments in their lifetime, which is really just the one, over and over, until people die or divorce. What it is depends on who you are and what your parents did to you.

I don't think people can help it. We play with fire and tell ourselves we're just lighting a modest, necessary candle. We know discretion is called for and everything in us cries out to be seen, to spread our feathers.

I wish I'd thrown my arms around Gus's neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.

My vision of the future was like the paintings I'd seen of the Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.)

Carny people'd punch you in the face before they'd let you tell them your troubles and strangle their own selves before they'd tell you theirs.

We love the attentiveness of powerful people, because it's such a pleasant, gratifying surprise, but Eleanor was not a grand light shining briefly on the lucky little people. She reached for the soul of everyone who spoke to her, every day. She bowed her head toward yours, as if there was nothing but the time and necessary space for two people to briefly love each other.

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

We were determined to be the people we wanted to be and not the blind, desperate people we were.

Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn't make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.

Criticism is like pain. It's not fun but if it doesn't hurt, no one pays attention.

He] was what people called a man's man. He fixed things and he had a deep laugh. He looked like he could carry you out of a burning building and he looked like the kind of man who would go back in to get your poodle. And even though he made fun of his own looks [...], I liked his face.

But I know who you should be with. You should be with a guy who doesn't mind that you're smarter than he is, who doesn't mind that most of the time, you'll be the main event. You need to be with a guy who supports how hard you work and who'll bring you a cup of coffee late at night.

It was a festival of maternal love, all day, every day.

When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.

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.

Scenes are alluded to but not always witnessed—because in life, one sometimes arrives late, or not at all, to the big scene, even though one feels its aftershocks for years. Conversations are overheard, but not always completely understood, and sometimes, even the eavesdropping must be abruptly curtailed—as in life.