Quotes from Jenna Blum

Reality is subjective, don't you know that by now? It's how we experience the world that makes it real to us.

Yes, Charles is a genius, and he loves his manias. But Charles's disorder is the gift nobody wants to be given. There is no cure for it, no solution. Either Charles takes his medications and suffers, or he doesn't and everyone else does. It is colossally, sickeningly, definitively unfair.

Time will fold over the past if you let it.

The Mississippi flows slowly by and the sun shines clean over everything, and Karena knows Tiff thinks she is crying because of Charles, because her brother is stuck in a mental asylum instead of out and about on this beautiful day the way he should be, healthy and alert and comfortable in his own skin.

Just that ever since I was very little I'd had this--affliction, or gift, or whatever you want to call it; that I have visions. And that this is something I accept about myself as part of who I am, a scary part sometimes , but also the best part of me because it makes me who I am, you know? It helps me understand things.

They call him a wicasa wakan, Charles says. A divine man. A blessed man. Sure, somebody whose soul is eroded more quickly that other people's especially if he uses his talents to help them. Because he can see things others can't, and that's a psychic burden. Still. It's not stigmatized like it is in our culture. It's viewed as it should be, with respect.

How many times have I heard you Whirlwind guys say that even now, after all these years of research, nobody knows why one supercell spawns a tornado and another doesn't? Why wouldn't that be the case for people too? Every brain is different and responds differently to treatment, and what might not help one person, for instance holistic medicine, might help the next.

They change my brain. So in essence, what you're saying I should do is compromise my very self, my understanding and feeling of who I am, to conform to what you want. Is that it?

Kevin was right, Karena thinks, there is grotesquerie here, but it's not Karena and Charles. It's Charles's disorder, the way it reduces a grown man to sobbing panic on the floor. The way it renders Karena unable to feel. The way it takes you by the hand, nodding and smiling slyly, and leads you back to the same old place every time, so just when you think everything might be all right after all, you come home and open a door to a room full of blood.

Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.

Procrastination: as endemic to and dreaded by writers as writers' block.

All I'd ever wanted to do in my life was write and publish books, and woe to anyone who stood in my way.

Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.

How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?

My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central's main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back - because CBS' first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people's television sets used to shake when the trains came in!

She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.

'The Lucky One' features a young concentration camp survivor named Peter Rashkin - who's about the age my dad was when he started at CBS - working at the Oyster Bar, trying to acclimate to his new country and outrun the memories of the daily he left behind.

I was married when I was in my early twenties, and my former husband, an absolutely lovely man, didn't get the writing thing.

I have a brother I love dearly, although we're not twins! I'm ten years older than he is, so I sometimes feel like his second mother.

When I was reading 'The Underground Railroad,' I had to actually hold my hand over the right-hand page so I wouldn't see, by mistake, what was coming up next - it was so suspenseful. it's really masterful.

As a white, female, half-Jewish writer, when I read 'The Underground Railroad,' it reminded me that America isn't just the sort of Sesame Street that I grew up with that tolerated and embraced diversity in the Northeast, but in fact was built on the foundation of slavery.

Unlike writing a book, which can take several years, baking is instant gratification.