Amy Bloom Quotes & Sayings

It takes something to get married: nerve, hope, a strong desire to make a certain statement - and it takes something to stay married: more hope, determination, a sense of humor, and needs that are best met by being in a pair. — Amy Bloom

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments. — Amy Bloom

Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me. — Amy Bloom

Aging is a chance to make what was good, great; and what was never so good, better. — Amy Bloom

Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves. — Amy Bloom

I don't think writers really choose their subjects. I think the subjects, the topics, the themes, choose us, and then we make the most of what we have. For Trollope, society; for Roth, Jews. For me, apparently, love. Why hide it? — Amy Bloom

I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around. — Amy Bloom

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge. — Amy Bloom

It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It's not because anyone in their right mind says, 'You know, what's the most fascinating thing in the world?' It's because you need something new that happens every week in a frame. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too. — Amy Bloom

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

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. — Amy Bloom

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened. — Amy Bloom

You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary. — Amy Bloom

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too. — Amy Bloom

I am interested in struggle - between our hearts and our head, between principle and desire - and one of those struggles is with mortality; and no one at all is immune to it, which makes it even more interesting to me. Some people fall in love, some don't. Some sky dive, some don't. Everyone who lives, ages. — Amy Bloom

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, — Amy Bloom

I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with. — Amy Bloom

The truth is I never think of any subject as taboo. — Amy Bloom

I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

The German deli was run by a distant cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Great Neck Jews loved the place; they flocked to Kuch's. They said to one another, What a character he is, Otto, strictly old country, I'm telling you. Gus didn't think that Negroes would rush to shop in a store run by some retired slave owner, eager to share memories of fun times on the plantation, praising Massa's old-fashioned Mississippi charm. Jews were still chasing that absurd, wishful feather. Eventually, Jews would become like everybody else. They'd elevate small grievances; they'd cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue. — Amy Bloom

My grandmother tended to divide life into 'nice' and 'not so nice.' Life in America, her apartment, her grandchildren: 'nice'; life before 1915: 'not so nice.' That's all I heard. — Amy Bloom

I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose - and people who aren't related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary. — Amy Bloom

She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them. — Amy Bloom

'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums. — Amy Bloom

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

I find my readers to be very smart, and there is no reason to write dumb. — Amy Bloom

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse. — Amy Bloom

I do have a sister. I have never written much about sisters before. I am very close to my sister, but, maybe, because we are very close, it never occurred to me to write about her. — Amy Bloom

Moving forward only because backward wasn't possible. — Amy Bloom

The knock-kneed brown moose, a tired group of ten, yards ahead of her for the last three days, comfort her too. It's like following a pack of grandfathers, their large, weary eyes, red lids sagging, their gray muzzles, puckered as if the world is almost done with them but not quite yet. — Amy Bloom

We live and we love the world, Lillian thinks, and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back. — Amy Bloom

I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness. — Amy Bloom

I couldn't ask her anything. There wasn't a single question to which I'd get the answer I wanted. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

[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. — Amy Bloom

Clare is good, spiky company, and she is the very best companion to have in a bad situation. Trouble brings out the cheer beneath her darkness, unlike everyday life, which tends to have the opposite effect — Amy Bloom

My father quoted everyone, from Shakespeare to Emerson, on the subject of destiny, and then he'd point out that except for the Greeks, everyone agreed: The stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way. — Amy Bloom

If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

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

Dialogue is not conversation. It is conversation's greatest hits. — Amy Bloom

People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans. — Amy Bloom

Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us. — Amy Bloom

We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious. — Amy Bloom

Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it's a story that's on a stage, but there's a different sort of tension that appears on stage - you get to see your characters in a different way - like with lights. — Amy Bloom

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

My ideal meal varies, depending on the time of year. Lobster on a deck overlooking a beach at sunset is one - but all my kids have to be there, because they are all lobster-lovers. Making a bolognese sauce over pappardelle for my husband on a winter evening, because he loves my bolognese sauce and it's his comfort food. — Amy Bloom

I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we don't always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel. — Amy Bloom

There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.' — Amy Bloom

You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful. — Amy Bloom

We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn't mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don't happen. It's a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them. — Amy Bloom

And sometimes we cling because the memory is so painful that we can't stop visiting it and hoping to make it come out differently. The risk of letting go is that we have to confront our own selves and our own possibilities. — Amy Bloom

I do my business in the morning, and then at 2 P.M., I write fiction for the rest of the day. I like my husband, so I don't work at weekends. — Amy Bloom

'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work. — Amy Bloom

...as he cannot sleep on Helen's side, which is where he has secretly arranged three of her embroidered pillows, and sleeps facing them, one arm around the middle pillow, the other curled under his head, his hand resting on his brow as if for protection. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer. — Amy Bloom

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

I've written the best work I know how. And I'm appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work - and that's pretty much the end of that. — Amy Bloom

Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting. — Amy Bloom

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

I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight. — Amy Bloom

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

My father certainly believed that one could make a living outside of an office, as he did. And that if I didn't want to work for other people, there wasn't any reason why I had to. He conveyed that very strongly to my sister and I - that smart people can make their own livings. — Amy Bloom

He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said - women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me. — Amy Bloom

Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner. — Amy Bloom

Boundaries are the lines we draw that mark off our autonomy and that of other people, that protect our privacy and that of others. Boundaries allow for intimate connection without dissolving or losing one's sense of self. — Amy Bloom

Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. — Amy Bloom

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle. — Amy Bloom

If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity. — Amy Bloom

As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being. — Amy Bloom

The Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.) — Amy Bloom

She suffered from the opposite of "phantom limb" syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not. — Amy Bloom

The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

I find the 1940s very compelling. It is a very excitable period in the U.S. when, whether out of necessity or not, everybody was reinventing themselves. — Amy Bloom

I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment. — Amy Bloom

All intimacy is rare-that's what makes it precious. — Amy Bloom

Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever. — Amy Bloom

They danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song. — Amy Bloom

It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often. — Amy Bloom

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you. — Amy Bloom

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. — Amy Bloom

My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman. — Amy Bloom

She didn't understand a thing about Catholics. It's all praise Mary, she said, women doing all the hard work and letting men run the church and calling the shots for everyone. — Amy Bloom

So we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat. — Amy Bloom

People," he said. "They can't be underestimated. — Amy Bloom

A blind man can see how much I love you — Amy Bloom

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died' - if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator. — Amy Bloom

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. — Amy Bloom

Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can't make friends with grief, you've got to at least make way for it. — Amy Bloom

She didn't believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend. — Amy Bloom

I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading. — Amy Bloom