Quotes from Jim Shepard

I'll find something in what I read that snags my imagination in emotional terms; it resonates with me for reasons more complicated than just that it seems like it would make a good story.

You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.

The child has the right to respect,' Ã¢â'¬Â he said. " Ã¢â'¬ËœThe child has the right to develop. The child has the right to be. The child has the right to grieve. The child has the right to learn. And the child has the right to make mistakes.' 

the cure for a toothache was to slap the other side of your face.

At home i let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.

The salt of the earth dissolves and the shit remains

I just go through life not doing anything to anyone, wreaking havoc left and right.

My mother thinks that what keeps me going is a well of spitefulness.' ... 'I think she's right. I can feel it right here.

We do not see our hand in what happens, and so we call certain events melancholy accidents… —Stanley Cavell

It took a month after the breakup for her to realize that she was refusing to go anywhere that didn't have cell service on the off chance he'd call, and after that revelation she [Jeannine Dziri] found herself wondering if you were wrong to believe that you went on as yourself even after the loss of that person who had so decisively shaped you.

loneliness as solitude with self-pity thrown in.

Her [Valerie Landry's] mentor in med school had reminded her more than once that doctors got even less time than families had to deal with patients dying. Someone died and the relatives went off by themselves and collapsed, but you still had the rest of your shift to get through.

I had this real hardass for a tutorial in grad school,' Jeannine finally said. 'And this one time when I told him that maybe my project hadn't panned out because it had been too ambitious, he said that he'd always thought that the moral of the Icarus story was not 'Don't try to fly too high.' He said he thought it was 'Do a better job on the wings.

In the U.S., whichever party was in power wasn't interested in support for public health. Public health never competed well for resources in either the House or the Senate. Countries were like people: they didn't value health until they lost it. And then once they got it back, they returned to their old complacency.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.