Quotes from Jess Walter

And what she loved about Lydia's play: that it gets at this idea that true sacrifice is painless.

you broke up two marriages, and faked a young woman's illness, and bribed her to get an abortion—all in the first chapter—

Shit. Claire riffles through worst-case scenarios: The pay is in cocaine;

My dad worked for 40 years in an aluminum plant. I don't think he ever got "aluminum block.

This is what happens when your life is authored not by God, but by David Mamet.

how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.

very, very rarely—the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning

waiting for her movie to start," and that she'd almost missed out on her life waiting for it.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!" Debra

It's another mystery of parenting: how you can love your kids without always liking them.

Maybe it's being close to the end, but I have this desire to pull Greg aside—to pull all my children aside, and my grandchildren—and to whisper something profound, to pass on the great wisdom I've acquired. Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity. But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience.

An ignorant orange grifter was elected president and turned science denial into official government position.

Starbucks is, unsurprisingly, the only thing open in this storm, commerce's cockroach

Among the world's evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid's school.

But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do

True sacrifice is painless.

Always speak first to the toughest person in the room.

Like being friends with a storm cloud

Maybe all love is hopeless.

I've always been surprised at how it stings, the laughter of small men. The smaller the man, the more the laughter hurts, as if saying, I may be nothing, but you are less.

That's why people write books and stories, no doubt, to leave some impression behind, to share a sense of the beauty and pain. This

Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming?

All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?

It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire.