Quotes from Jincy Willett

The future, vague and sad, did not frighten me half as much as knowing that it was not carved in stone.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.

I spent my next hour reshelving, and the next thirty minutes straightening out the Mc's and Mac's. Nobody on God's earth understands the Mc/Mac principle anymore. In order to do that, you have to be willing to think about something other than your genitals for a full minute.

I love you, Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, You son of a bitch.

Perhaps all young girls should receive voice-deepening instruction, as they once had learned how to iron men's white oxford-cloth shirts and walk with books on their heads.

Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself…there wouldn't be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

She pretended to find dust ruffles feminine and cozy, but really they were just flimsy barriers beyond which lurked the malign viscosity under her bed.

Jenny Marzen is who again? Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. And Jenny is my number one fan? No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school. What is she, twelve? The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you've got gravitas. That's a dirty lie. I never even had mono.

It was morning, and nothing frightened Amy in the morning, because her will to live never kicked in until after lunch.

Not just the absence of sound, but positive, warm, burnished silence.

Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone. Where we don't have to ask how it feels, because we feel it for ourselves.

I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.