I Wanted Her To To Go On Talking And Understand Without Me Saying Anything. I Wanted Her To Love Me Enough To Leave Him, To Pack Us Up And Take Us Away From Him, To Kill Him If Need Be. (107)
My Heart Broke All Over Again. I Wanted My Life Back, My Mama, But I Knew I Would Never Have That. The Child I Had Been Was Gone With The Child She Had Been. We Were New People, And We Didn't Know Each Other Anymore. I Shook My Head Desperately.
People Begin To Write In Order To Create What They Have Not Found And, A Little Bit, To Give Something Back.
...i Have Come To Make Distinctions Between What I Call The Academy And Literature, The Moral Equivalents Of Church And God. The Academy May Lie, But Literature Tries To Tell The Truth.
Twenty Years After We Had Left So Fierce And Proud, We Were All Right Back Where We Had Started, Yoked To Each Other And The Same Old Drama.
I Was Born In 1949, And By The Time I Was 10, I Figured Out That My Hope Chest Was Not Aimed In The Same Direction Everybody Else's Was. And That Life Was Going To Be Very, Very Complicated. And That I Could Either Be Provocative And Declamatory, Or Shy, Retiring And Scared.
The Worst Thing In The World Was The Way I Felt When I Wanted Us To Be Like The Families In The Books In The Library, When I Just Wanted Daddy Glen To Love Me Like The Father In Robinson Crusoe. (209)
And While It Is True That I Got The Best Woman In The World, I Don't Think Love Saves You.
I Tell My Students You Have An Absolute Right To Write About People You Know And Love. You Do. But The Kicker Is You Have A Responsibility To Make The Characters Large Enough That You Will Not Have Sinned Against Them.
