43 Quotes by Ben Dolnick

We're like the hands of a clock...chasing and escaping each other, losing and finding each other, around and around, again and again, joined way down at the root, no matter how far apart.

Neither of us had lived in a house since we were kids; apartments, it turns out, are very different things, psychologically. Houses—especially old and creaky houses—are individuals, somehow; their fronts are faces, their closets are pants pockets.

Neither of us had lived in a house since we were kids; apartments, it turns out, are very different things, psychologically. Houses – especially old and creaky houses – are individuals, somehow; their fronts are faces, their closets are pants pockets.

We’re like the hands of a clock... chasing and escaping each other, losing and finding each other, around and around, again and again, joined way down at the root, no matter how far apart.

Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.

People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I just hated her - she was so mean.' 'He's a bully; I didn't like how he treated his mother.'

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.

I know very well that to admit to loving Bright Eyes is to admit to having an overgrown brain region devoted to self-pity, sentimentality, regret, and a handful of other not very appealing emotional states.