Peter Orner Quotes & Sayings

It comes down to this. When we die, not only will our bodies be gone, but so will the people we remember. We live in the world, and we recall the world, and one day we won't do either anymore. The church bells will ring and the drunks will drink. — Peter Orner

Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here's a real crime of passion. Or was it? I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down. — Peter Orner

Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up? — Peter Orner

I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I lived in the moment. — Peter Orner

John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections human beings make, that in spite of everything, we will always make. To quote from the book, 'What he saw in the people was what the old anthropologists called communitas. It wasn't that the people sang and moved. It was their singing and moving together' Singing and moving together, Wood has found a way to express this profound and beautiful idea through fiction. — Peter Orner

I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories. — Peter Orner

I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out. — Peter Orner

I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it? — Peter Orner

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are. — Peter Orner

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching. — Peter Orner

I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done. — Peter Orner

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after. — Peter Orner

The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life. — Peter Orner

Actually, you're not famous at all. Maybe you'll get some traction after you're dead? — Peter Orner

I used to be surprised and a little annoyed when characters would reappear in my mind, itching to be in another story. Now I realize it's part of the deal, that you create these people out of thin air but then, if you do it right, they actually live. — Peter Orner

If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end. — Peter Orner

Everybody, doesn't matter who you are, escapes time. And for me, nothing is stranger than the thought that kids are just kids. Nobody is just anything. Whether you are eight or eighty, you've got your own unique take on how weird this world is. — Peter Orner

That's it. I'm asking you, I'm really asking you - how is it possible that we aren't in a permanent state of mourning? — Peter Orner

The lake is always east. East is always the lake. Anywhere else he's ever been he never knows where he is. — Peter Orner

Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person's life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned I was not to be trusted. — Peter Orner

One story I've been trying to write for years, and haven't been able to finish, is about a face I saw, just a glimpse of a face, in a max security prison in North Carolina. I'm still trying to understand what I saw in that guy's face. — Peter Orner

A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories ... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding a place but the soul of its people. — Peter Orner

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us
warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there
watching our every move. — Peter Orner

Rarely is the pain of losing someone expressed with such directness, energy, and, yes, humor. The grief in Evan Kuhlman'sWolf Boyis palpable, and so is the flawed, honest humanity of his characters. Here is real loss and somehow, real catharsis. — Peter Orner

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades. — Peter Orner

I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometimes - can help anybody get any better or worse at it. — Peter Orner

But this is exactly why I read
and don't belong to a book group
because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix. — Peter Orner

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another. — Peter Orner

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso. — Peter Orner

Leo wondered what unknown sin they must have committed in some previous life to deserve this. The answer came the same way their feet later shocked to life in the warming hut after being so numb for hours- you think you'll never feel your toes again, and then all of a sudden life, damaged, stiffened, clammy, but life, dog-eat-dog life! We have not done a single thing to deserve this. — Peter Orner

My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets. — Peter Orner

Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn't a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can't, I won't, because to save her once isn't to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn't silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can't hear you. — Peter Orner