44 Quotes by Amity Gaige

Where does a mistake begin?” his wife asks at the start of the book. “Did my mistake begin with the boat? Or my marriage itself?

Michael and I both recognized we had problems, we just couldn’t agree on the solution. I think what was happening was, I wasn’t just talking about the implausible plan to walk away from our house and the kids’ schools and Michael’s job, no matter how assured we would be of getting these things back. I was wondering, whether we were to go or to stay, what would we do— about us?

You think this will solve all our problems. It’s magical thinking, Michael. It’s the way a child thinks.

Fair, what a useless word. A concept that is relevant only in the rare moments when there is no greater danger than unfairness.

Let's admit it; the only use for complaining is to make people laugh.

Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.

I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.