Quotes from Diane Johnson

A chaplain's biggest gift is to be present and just listen.

Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.

Laughter is the jam on the toast of life. It adds flavor, keeps it from being too dry, and makes it easier to swallow.

Men are generally more law-abiding than women. Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

It didn't seem fair that you could not prevent being the object of other people's emotions, you were not safe from their hate--or from their love, for that matter. You were never safe from being invaded by their feelings when you wanted only to be rid of them, free, off, away.

Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

If WHO statistics were to be believed, the U.S. had the worst maternal mortality in the industrialized world.

To see the right thing to do and not to do it is cowardice.

Well, their piety is more evolved," said Mrs. Pace. "In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the worldly.

Noel lay stuck to the Naugahyde and apparently felt nothing. His back, soft and wasted, was not unlike Max's. Noel's was so feminine; Max's so dark and hairy - hairier than Noel's. It was dismal to have a hairy wife.

You can only forgive a man if you don't love him. One's countrymen are always a humiliation for the traveler, whatever the country.

He was a mesmerizing character, with deep-set gypsylike eyes, the longish hair, the poetic darkness.

Reading is the solitary essential pastime to which all summer houses are peculiarly dedicated. I became a foreigner. For myself, that is what a writer is - a man living on the other side of a frontier.

It's actually Jane Austen who pushes Louisa Musgrove off the slippery rocks.

One is never as happy as one thinks, nor as unhappy as one hopes.

Misfortune prompts us to summon our utmost strength to oppose grief and recover tranquility, while prosperity hurries us away until we are overwhelmed by our passions. Queen Margot Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. La Rochefoucault We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears. I sometimes wonder is the esprit, gaiety, intellectual seriousness and serious stylishness of the earlier period was the reflex of poverty and shared hardship.

Loyalty is a virtue everyone admires, especially the disloyal

Yet—some Frenchman had written—"absence diminishes commonplace passions and enhances great ones.

Laughter is the jam on the toast of life. It adds flavor, keeps it from being too dry, and makes it easier to swallow.

Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.