138 Quotes by Amy Bloom

Criticism is like pain. It’s not fun but if it doesn’t hurt, no one pays attention.

Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us.

Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn’t make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.

We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn’t mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don’t happen. It’s a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them.

Whitman said, ‘I am as bad as the worst but, thank God, I am as good as the best.’ You ought to spend more time with people who know how bad they are.

Amelia said, “I think women – some women – regard matrimony as a highly honorable retreat from the possibility of failure in the larger world.

You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.

Carny people’d punch you in the face before they’d let you tell them your troubles and strangle their own selves before they’d tell you theirs.

When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.