45 Quotes by Cynthia Kadohata

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

For me, books are music for my mind and my imagination. When I am stuck in something I’m writing, I simply read my way out of being stuck. You can never waste time reading.

I almost never slept deeply anymore – as soon as she said my name, I always sat up immediately, no matter how tired I was.

Some days I think she was really miserable, because she cried a lot. In a way, I’d had to steel my heart to her crying. You need to steel yourself to a lot of things when someone in your family is really sick.

I felt like I didn’t understand a single thing in the whole world. I didn’t understand a single person. I didn’t even understand myself.

I watched a swatch of the sky turn red. The red spread like blood in the sea: red, red, red, and then less and less red, until there was only blue left. I squinted as the sun rose. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, my father was carrying me into the house. Sam walked beside us carrying the lawn chair, which seemed almost as big as he was. Inside the living room my father laid me on my cot. “She’s gone,” he said.

Was I good or bad or mixed or what? And was the way I acted every day the real me, or was the real me somewhere so deep that I would never even know it?

Suddenly, Mr. Parker’s shoulders drooped and he gave up, mumbling, “Happy wife, happy life.

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing.