Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.
Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.
Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.
When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.
Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.
You're always on your way somewhere. The key is: find a way to be happy wherever you now are on your way to where you really want to be. (We're speaking of the state of being you want. ) It does not matter where you are; where you are is shifting constantly - but you must turn your attention to where you want to go. And that's the difference between making the best of something and making the worst of something.
I feel like I'm 1,000. I don't feel I'm young enough a lot of the time.
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the Black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that twenty-two million Black people have not risen up against their oppressors in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria and even by the democratic traditions.
Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.