Kathleen Rooney Quotes & Sayings

Here's some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you've made before you look askance at somebody else's." I — Kathleen Rooney

like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing. — Kathleen Rooney

What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain. I — Kathleen Rooney

As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics. — Kathleen Rooney

Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one. — Kathleen Rooney

Whenever "everyone" is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I — Kathleen Rooney

This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objectives. If one knocks oneself out of one's routine- and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs- then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is — Kathleen Rooney

A lot of these love notes seem to be from well-read and lovesick young men with literary aspirations. That type doesn't interest me in the least. They say they only have eyes for gazing at you and then end up gazing right back at their navels. — Kathleen Rooney

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested. — Kathleen Rooney

committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable. I — Kathleen Rooney

caelum, non animum mutant, for instance - climate may change, but not character - and — Kathleen Rooney

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming. — Kathleen Rooney

Not to give too big of a spoiler, but I never find myself thinking, for example, Oh, remember that crazy time I stumbled on that closeted Republican candidate's sex tape? — Kathleen Rooney

this, they've never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don't count anymore. I think it's small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth. — Kathleen Rooney

My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight. — Kathleen Rooney

If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready. — Kathleen Rooney

We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed." "I remember that," I say. And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it - calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable - though it was Johnson who finally signed it. — Kathleen Rooney

Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened. — Kathleen Rooney

New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is. — Kathleen Rooney

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel. — Kathleen Rooney

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For — Kathleen Rooney

Time only goes in that one direction. — Kathleen Rooney

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving. ... Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof. — Kathleen Rooney

That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within — Kathleen Rooney

We've been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us? I — Kathleen Rooney

All right, all right," he said, with that gesture I'd come to hate: two open palms facing me and patting the air, as if pushing me away, pushing me down, pushing any tears I might be preparing to cry back into their ducts. — Kathleen Rooney

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate. — Kathleen Rooney

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith "politeness." That's part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity - one's own and others' - but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety. — Kathleen Rooney

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I — Kathleen Rooney

But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained. — Kathleen Rooney

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love. — Kathleen Rooney

The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue. — Kathleen Rooney

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective. — Kathleen Rooney

In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction. — Kathleen Rooney

Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I'd made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds. — Kathleen Rooney

I never have trouble keeping fact and invention straight. — Kathleen Rooney

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant. — Kathleen Rooney

If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear. — Kathleen Rooney

I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything. — Kathleen Rooney

I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them. — Kathleen Rooney

Maybe I'll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That — Kathleen Rooney