Quotes from Sandra Newman

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.

Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me.

All great works start with mistake. Ain't no exception in this fact.

It was beautiful to be heartbroken, it was as pleasurable as a thing could be. But pointless.

That sense of the world being the lack of something dogged him for years, and when it stopped dogging him, he felt unmoored.

Then we all sat around; we were supposed to be awed. I was brattishly unawed.

When I been small, once Driver told me cricket singing was the voice of stars.

There were others like her. Of course there were. How had she ever thought there would not be?

It was night, and the sky spreading into a rain that fell like darkness visible, a glistering where there was no light.

Then my tears come blinding, and he lead me by the arm. I stumble in the elevator, thinking of that moon rain. Salt that last forever, grief that live beyond all life.

You really don't understand what it's like to have bad parents, do you?

So he thinks he has a baby and everything falls into place? What gets me is, people have babies and they're thinking what the baby will do for them . It's sick.

For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin.

Sweet wine from Spain and gossip from France; the sun in the windows dimmed, sorrowed prettily as the day declined, until the candles' light was mirrored in the glass. Their dabbling flames were like guesses at a feeling, the hearth's fire like the feeling itself. It was a beautiful pastime she had missed; hours that had stepped light-footed on Emilia's memory and passed on.

But something had shifted. She pursued it, saying, "My father was a Jew of Venice. 'Tis true: I am of that hated race." He said cautiously, "Much evil is spoken of Jews. But men will speak villainously of anything strange. I am sure they say much that is false.

Nonetheless, it left him with a terrible doubt, a fear that inhabited every scene.

At last he had risen to hold forth tragically about the misfortune that it was to be alive.

But this was reality, occluded and delicate.

Because crazy people weren't weaker than you—he'd often thought this about his mother—they were stronger. They outlasted you, even when they died. They would tread you underfoot without noticing.

She couldn't know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn't be anyone, but she could still love.

Every pain be gold.

I know, ain't evils in no life nor cruelties in no red hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star.

He wear a roo suit - grey-green dapple thing, ain't satisfy to be one ugly color, it be ugly twice.

You have to understand, it's how we are here. It's like we're all asleep. We grow up, we fall asleep, and then the horrors that scared us before - we're doing them. We're the monsters in the nightmare.