Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.
When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.
Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.
I want to save my people. That is the purpose of my life
There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.
I don't want the reader to be aware of me as the writer.
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?