Quotes from Roger Rosenblatt

About the Author Winner of a Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, a Peabody Award, an Emmy, and two Polk awards, ROGER ROSENBLATT is University Professor of Writing at Long Island University Southampton College. He writes essays for Time magazine and for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. He lives in Manhattan and Quogue, Long Island.

the scenes and moments that elbow their way to positions of prominence.

My anger, being futile, flares in the wrong places and at the wrong times.

Do not judge others by their dramatic moments—how they may panic or become nasty or wild in a crisis—in contrast to their much different normal behavior.

Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.

Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life.

Death is something that happens to others, you think, until it happens to you.

One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world.

If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen.

Time can be such a menace to a man. By this age do that; by that age do better.

Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.

No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.

I think there must be something wrong with me as a writer. Because all my friends who are writers find reasons to hate everything about their day. But I just love writing. I love starting the day with language and seeing if I can make something of it.

Only by moving in the direction you least trust can you be saved

The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands.

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

If you're going to believe in God, if you're going to take that leap of faith, as I do, then the God that seems the most comprehensible to me would be the God who set us spinning and said 'Good luck.'

The God I do believe in is the God who doesn't care: James Joyce's God who stands back, paring his fingernails.

Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head.

If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it 'focused.'

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

A five-year old is in a pretty good position to assess who is beautiful and who is not. Removed from the confusions of sexuality, he or she can judge a face as a face.

The problem with death is absence

Friends are lights in winter; the older the friend, the brighter the light.