18 Quotes by Michelle Huneven

To find love is the great human undertaking...and it's always complicated by our compulsions and unconscious patterns, to say nothing of issues of trust and control.

There’s something to be said for geographic affinity, all right.

There’s always the literature cure. Take a big box of books out to the desert and read until things shift. Bleak House can cure anything.”Lewis smacked the steering wheel. “Bleak House is about my favorite fucking book in the world.

David Ibañez was in town. . . . Both he and Rafael suffered from terrible hay fever and nursed cups of a naturally decongesting tea made from the mahuang plant, brewing more tea for anyone else who needed it. David had brought the mahuang seeds from an herbalist in Shanghai, and Rafael kept a good crop of the low, scrubby bush in his yard at all times. He said it was the best hay fever treatment he knew, and whenever Santa Ana weather kicked in, he was the most popular man in the valley.

You know, I always think about going back to college. Just to catch up on all those books that supposedly shape our lives but nobody ever reads.”“Yeah? Like what?”. . . “Well, there’s the Bible. You ever read it?”“Parts,” said Lewis.“Well, this whole wrecked civilization is based on a book most people have only read parts of.

At one point, Jack was enlisted to move Red from his aunt Maude’s house in Redlands to his grandma Iris’s house in Pomona.

I think we all have our demons and our various shortcomings, and it would be nice if people felt more gently about other people, but also about themselves.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

My mother cooked her last Christmas standing rib roast in 1987 and died a few weeks afterward.