Quotes from Melissa Bank

'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.

Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.

I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

You act like I just want to sleep with you... I want to EVERYTHING with you.

The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.

She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. We are all children until our fathers die.

She seems sort of lost.' I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.

Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.

It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He's like me, just with different details.

You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol of the ladies room door.

Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the better person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.

He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.

You realize that if he doesn't know who you are, he won't be able to remember who you were.

It was the opposite of love, and yet it wasn't love I was opposed to but the murmurs that said, This is your chance, which seemed less like the promise of a door opening than the threat of one sealing shut.

When you're out She advised, try to appear captivated.

He loves New York, he says. 'It's like Oberlin--it's where people who don't belong anywhere belong.

When he takes off his shirt, I see that his shoulders are narrow and his chest almost hairless and almost concave. For a second I'm disappointed but right away I think, Grow up; this is the chest of a husband.

The women are young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking; they are batter, and I am the sponge cake they don't know they'll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan.