Cathleen Schine Quotes & Sayings

There are no moral lectures in 'Lookaway, Lookaway;' there aren't even any lessons. But there is passion. It is a work that hides its craft but never its beauty, that is ambitious but never pretentious, that does not sacrifice nuance for power or power for nuance. — Cathleen Schine

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight. — Cathleen Schine

Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling. Life kicks you in the balls. — Cathleen Schine

It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction. — Cathleen Schine

For women, World War II had offered an opportunity, and often the necessity, to get out of the house to work. — Cathleen Schine

If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing? — Cathleen Schine

Women are in positions of power the most radical of activists could only dream of in 1960. — Cathleen Schine

Good TV is not just TV about good behavior. — Cathleen Schine

One of my favorite passages in 'Leaves of Grass,' that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is 'Mannahatta.' — Cathleen Schine

Dress you? I'd rather undress you. We don't belong together. But you belong to me. I want you not as you might be. I want you as you are. — Cathleen Schine

Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition. But her feelings for her daughter she recognized as inevitable, irresistable, and she reveled in them. — Cathleen Schine

I was one of those children they used to call 'readers.' — Cathleen Schine

The night was mossy and hot... — Cathleen Schine

No, it's like you get an idea in your head ... no, it's more like you get and idea in your heart. — Cathleen Schine

Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' — Cathleen Schine

Everyone who moves to New York City has a book or movie or song that epitomizes the place for them. For me, it's 'The Cricket in Times Square', written by George Selden and illustrated by Garth Williams. — Cathleen Schine

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however. — Cathleen Schine

They ate and picked sand from their chicken in the pink light. — Cathleen Schine

Love letters lack taste. No restraint: falling off cliffs, going up in flames. — Cathleen Schine

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read. — Cathleen Schine

I do all my shopping on the Web. I do much of my research online. I have a blog, too. It is definitely a distraction. It is definitely a blessing. What blessing isn't a distraction, though? — Cathleen Schine

...bottle green Jaguar. — Cathleen Schine

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio ... But after 1400? Nihil. — Cathleen Schine

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have. — Cathleen Schine

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books. — Cathleen Schine

'What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal' was thrilling in its light, deceptive tone, its subtle but irresistible momentum. — Cathleen Schine

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising? — Cathleen Schine

Elinor Lipman tweets like a nightingale with an eagle eye. — Cathleen Schine

Anyone who has read a Trollope novel knows that women did not have to wait until 1960 to feel trapped. — Cathleen Schine

I grew up reading books about heroic collies. — Cathleen Schine

The honeysuckle was everywhere the day the letter arrived, like heat. Wild roses bloomed in hedges of tendrils and perfume. There were fat bees, dirigible bees, plump and miniature. It was a sweet, tangled morning, and the sun rose, leisurely, in a spectacular blush. — Cathleen Schine

Lines of gulls standing on glassy blue patches of wet sand. — Cathleen Schine

Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expos of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons. — Cathleen Schine

A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think. — Cathleen Schine

Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read. — Cathleen Schine

I love my bed. It is larger than a desk and better designed to hold books and papers. It is softer than a desk and better designed for naps. It is the center of all good things. And day or night, everyone knows where to find me. — Cathleen Schine

If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else. — Cathleen Schine

A letter ... changes utterly the moment it slips inside an envelope. It stops being mine. It becomes yours. What I mean is gone. What you understand is all that remains. — Cathleen Schine

I do not go out to dinner or to the movies with the neighbors, as I do with my friends. I don't make dates with them. I don't have to. — Cathleen Schine

The garden stretched out in a soft drift, colors jumbled any way, an unmade bed of red and yellow and pink. Then came the trees. Apple, plum, and the Japanese black pine. — Cathleen Schine

an unbroken line of unrelated people — Cathleen Schine

There had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs. — Cathleen Schine

Butterfield Blues Band, Vanilla Fudge... — Cathleen Schine

Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues. — Cathleen Schine

Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square. — Cathleen Schine

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire. — Cathleen Schine

I spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time on the Web. — Cathleen Schine

'Use Me' is a wonderfully satisfying book. — Cathleen Schine

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong. — Cathleen Schine

As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK; a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace. — Cathleen Schine

One really understands testicles after reading 'The Family Jewels,' and one is gratified. — Cathleen Schine

In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself. — Cathleen Schine

'Blue Nights' is a story of loss: simple, wrenching, inconsolable loss. — Cathleen Schine