Quotes from Jean Thompson

They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?

It was a writers' curse, this verbal embroidery. Never seeing anything as it was, always analyzing and reformulating it. Maybe the entire habit of observation, the thing he trained himself in, was just a nervous tic, a compulsion.

Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.

The artist on art. How do you get your ideas for stories Mr. Valentine? Well, I simply exploit everything I come into contact with. One ended, of course, by losing all spontaneity. You saw people as characters, sunsets as an excuse for similes -.

He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple.

Did poverty in itself lead to moral failings, such as crime? Was "goodness" something that could be objectified and measured? Did society benefit directly from individual virtue, and therefore have incentive to promote it? Did our concepts of goodness have their foundations in religious and spiritual practice? What about the notion that money was the root of all evil, and those monks and nuns who felt it necessary to deny themselves material wealth?

You know, your family's exactly like I imagined them. Exactly like you." "What's that supposed to mean?" "You're like the blackbirds. The blondbirds." "Very funny." "They're very nice. You always talk like they're Norwegian hillbillies or something.

Incongruous shiny new video-game parlor.

I am a tourist of the emotions, visiting only the most well-worn spots. It is romantic, that is, a distortion, to imagine whole lives from the barest observation.

Why did people get married seeking a way out of loneliness? There was nothing more lonelier than two married people in a room together. - p.126

Ryan and his father obediently headed off. At the bathroom door his father said, "Well, if finicky eaters make poor lovers, I don't know what you got here.