Quotes from Mona Simpson

A mother's happiness; something you recognize and then forget; it didn't seem to matter much, though it spread through our bodies.

Then what were feelings worth? Like currency, their value depended on a sound treasury, so love from a liar was pretty worthless.

The trouble with serenity is that it can turn. The trees seem to lose their souls and look again like painted scenery.

He thought about Lina saying she was like their mom. She was scared that it would happen to her. There was something tentative about his sister; he wasn't like that. His mother must have somehow given him a confidence that she didn't have herself. Still, Lina was an artist. That took courage. He'd made a bargain with life. He'd spend his time gaining the ease they'd once needed. His kids could be artists. He hoped they would be.

When Walter had come to see Lina's show, five years ago, he'd taken a secret trip to see Carrie and ask her a question. He told her, without words, I'm ready now. She lived, like a graduate student, in a neighborhood that felt like a vacation. Blooming flowers. Bamboo blinds, music coming out onto the sidewalks. She kept finches in a white painted aviary and rode her bike to the university library. But she'd sent him back to his life.

She would have loved to be able to hate her mother the way they did, with a breeziness carried by a fundamental trust in a home with a set table and dinner cooking.

Still, Walter had never contended with their mother the way she had. He hadn't been there for the worst of it. And their mother had always been different with him. Lina desperately wanted not to become her. Walter never for a second even considered that he could.

But would I have chosen to be Paul? I'd miss Will too much, the feel of his shins.

Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.

Carrie would always have him anyway, he thought, the way she had him now. Spring smells of dirt and rainwater rose from the ground. Love was a mixed business. As in building, he couldn't afford the refinement he desired. He needed too much. Carrie had been his great romance. He hadn't been hers. With Susan it wasn't romance, exactly. It was home.

I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven't lived in a small town since.

If a mother is sitting in a chair at the office, someone needs to be at home with her child. In some cases, that is a father. Much of the time, the material manifestation of the conflict is a nanny.

We go to college, live together or marry, and have kids - often with little more thought to the daily routines of raising children than our grandparents gave them, when women by and large stayed at home.

I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn't feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school.

Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.

Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.

I've never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one.

I'm not talking about whether or not you'll send me a card next February." She shook her head. "I can't be with a withholder. I won't live with little denials." The way she said that, it sounded like he'd proposed.