Quotes from Susan Straight

For someone like me who's lived in the same place her whole life - I mean, I lived three blocks from where I was born, and I met my future husband in the eighth grade - there are always family stories and legends passed down.

My father, born in Colorado, met my mother, born in Switzerland, when he went into the finance company where she worked and asked for a loan.

My mother was born in Switzerland, my stepfather in Canada.

I've always told my children that Americans will tell you pretty much anything, but that convention dictates that we don't like to talk money or politics.

I love seeing America vote, through the prism of my older working class neighborhood in Riverside, California.

The best thing I could say is you do have to be a really good listener. If I go to a family reunion, and there's 400 people there, everybody comes up and tells me their stories, right? And I think that when you're a good listener, and you can imagine how someone's talking, dialogue is your key friend, is it not?

My mother and father split up when I was three and my brother was still in the womb.

Teachers spend most of their daytime hours with children. Teachers at every level, coaches, counselors, cafeteria workers and yes, custodians, spend their hours trying to make children's lives different, if not always better.

In 'Love Story,' Oliver Barrett IV comes from generations of wealth and privilege, but when he meets working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, he can't resist. When they marry, his father disowns him, but they struggle on in love, until she's diagnosed with cancer and they can't afford the costly treatments.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

I'm trying to make the readers feel as if he or she is right there in the conversation, and so I don't try to manipulate it too much.

My brother acquired his first gun when he was very young, from a recently-fled drug dealer's residence. Now, he lived in a rural orange-grove area, and he shot at coyotes who killed his animals and at drug runners who used the groves for transport. Sometimes he joked that he only shot what moved.

I first drew the attention of my future husband when we were fourteen, on the freshman school bus for an epic field trip from Riverside, Calif. to Los Angeles, where we were taken to the L.A. Zoo as well as the Natural History Museum.

I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom.

The broken spine of the book shows the webbing of binder's string, and my fingers have worn white spots in the cover.

The Men hunted money and sex. The women were hunted and captured, even the white women.

We are the result of the love of thousands.

Our country feels as if it has gathered itself at a cliff and is studying the long scree of loose rock, deciding whether to slide down and descend completely again into open hatred.

lynchings between 1900 and the 1950s, to the murders during the civil rights movement, to killings that happen right now. This moment.

Only memory cannot be burned.

All we women have to give you is memory. Everything we washed is there. Everything we cooked. Everything we said. What we felt we might keep to ourselves, unless someone wrote it down.

Remembered my father telling me three is a pack: You have one dog and it probably won't bite; two dogs, you gotta watch out, especially a big one and little one, 'cause the little one tells the big one "Do it"; three dogs, you find a door to close.

There was inside her a core of fury and independence and self-preservation, the genetic heritage of survival.

I never saw a gun until I was 24. I didn't grow up in Mayberry; I grew up in Southern California.