50 Stewart O'Nan Quotes on Acceptance, The Odds: A Love Story and Midwest - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Stewart O'Nan quotes. There are more than 50 quotes in our Stewart O'Nan quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Stewart O'Nan wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Acceptance, The Odds: A Love Story and Midwest

Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you’ve only just opened your eyes.

Theirs was a private language, not shared with the rest of the world, and so exempt from censure, sheer burlesque.

While she was away, he’d forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.

It’s as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghost’s, vampire’s and Yankee fan’s rotten, cobwebby heart.

There’s nothing to do. You’ve been in the business long enough to understand grief. That’s the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don’t want to, you don’t want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death’s taught you that much at least.

Damn straight I’m lucky, I thought. I’m a Red Sox fan.

There was mystery at the heart of any of marriage, secrets even people close to it would never know.

Her anger was the fuel she used to keep going.

Getting sentimental,” you say, but who are you fooling, you’ve always been.

It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one’s own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.

Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.

The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink – this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He’d survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they’d just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.

Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you.

And even you, then, will wonder how you have such hope, and marvel at how impossible it is to stop the heart from reaching out into the whole world.

Being agreeable didn’t make people less difficult.

Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.

If all of this has taught you anything, it’s that hope is easier to get rid of than sorrow.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

While a necessary lesson, it was always a disappointment to discover he wasn’t the fastest or smartest or best at everything.

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions – everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

You’re proud of your ability to both believe and question everything. Secretly you think everyone does, but at some point they give in, surrender to the comfort of certainty. It’s too much trouble, this endless jousting of belief and doubt, too tiring. Finally you suppose it will break you, yet strangely it’s the only thing that keeps you going – though, true, at times you feel unbalanced, even somewhat mad.

A gift was what another person thought of you, and over the years he’d come to understand, by consensus, that his children saw him as someone who wore a tie to work, used power tools, played golf and drank scotch, which, while all true, seemed a superficial view of him. And yet when asked directly, he couldn’t say what he wanted. Nothing.

Getting inside your character’s head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can’t be duplicated in any other medium.

Saul Bellow once said, ‘A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation’ – which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was – losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they’re true or invented, legend or fact.

As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one.

Busyness Quotes Busywork Quotes Initiative Quotes Occupation Quotes Projects Quotes West of Sunset Quotes

He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't--a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.

Technology Quotes Travel Quotes / Air travel Quotes Airplanes Quotes Flying Quotes Journeys Quotes West of Sunset Quotes

Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women--all people, finally--complicated?

Complications Quotes Men Quotes Relationships Quotes West of Sunset Quotes Women Quotes

These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer -- all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.

West of Sunset Quotes

What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?

Challenges Quotes Men Quotes Relationships Quotes West of Sunset Quotes Women Quotes

You couldn’t relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole—like the world, or the person you loved.

The Odds: A Love Story Quotes

Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.

Address book Quotes Emily Quotes Alone Quotes Memory Quotes

He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn't come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor...

Songs for the Missing Quotes

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

Failure Quotes Success Quotes / Humiliation Quotes Self reliance Quotes West of Sunset Quotes

She didn't want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar

Emily Quotes Alone Quotes

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

Kindness Quotes Luck Quotes / Aging Quotes Emily Quotes Alone Quotes Fortune Quotes Good fortune Quotes Old age Quotes

It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don't fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were--their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven--and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the more fortunate clucking their tongues and counting their blessings, all the while knowing it was just a matter of time. She didn't need to be reminded that she was a single misstep from disaster, especially here, without Henry, surrounded by the survivors of an earlier life.

Accidents Quotes Aging Quotes Emily Quotes Alone Quotes Vulnerability Quotes

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He'd never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.

Love Quotes Romance Quotes / Bond Quotes Couples Quotes Intensity Quotes Passion Quotes Songs for the Missing Quotes Sparks Quotes

I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed.

Aging Quotes Arguments Quotes Coming home Quotes Daughters Quotes Emily Quotes Alone Quotes

Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.

Emily Quotes Alone Quotes Memory Quotes

Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.

Love Quotes / Relationships Quotes Songs for the Missing Quotes

They should.""Should be like a wood bee," she said.It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience.

Hope Quotes / Catchphrases Quotes Conversation Quotes Movies Quotes Pop culture Quotes The Odds: A Love Story Quotes Tv shows Quotes

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

Marriage Quotes / Challenge Quotes Songs for the Missing Quotes Support Quotes Survival Quotes Test Quotes

Come then, come with us, out into the night. Come now, America the lovesick, America the timid, the blessed, the educated, come stalk the dark backroads and stand outside the bright houses, calm as murderers in the yard, quiet as deer. Come, you slumberers, you lumps, arise from your legion of sleep and fly. Come, all you dreamers, all you zombies, all you monsters. What are you doing anyway, paying the bills, washing the dishes, waiting for the doorbell? Come on, take your keys, leave the bowl of candy on the porch, put on the suffocating mask of someone else and breathe. Be someone you don't love so much, for once. Listen: like the children, we only have one night.

The Night Country Quotes

To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.

The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy Quotes

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

Romance Quotes / Midwest Quotes Restlessness Quotes Songs for the Missing Quotes

The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?

Happiness Quotes Love Quotes Sadness Quotes / The Odds: A Love Story Quotes

The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.

Love Quotes / Acceptance Quotes Life Quotes The Odds: A Love Story Quotes Worth Quotes