19 Quotes by Michelle Richmond

To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

I expected marriage to be a door that we went through. Like a new house, you step into it, expecting it to be an unchanging space to inhabit. But, of course, I was wrong. Marriage is a living, changing thing that you must tend to both alone and together It grows in all sorts of ways, both ordinary and unexpected.

I've thought far more about marriage in recent months than I ever did before. What is the marriage contract? The general assumption we have about marriage is that it involves two people building a life together. But what I wonder is this: Does it require each person to give up the life they built before? Must we shed our former selves? Do we have to give up that which was once important to us as a sacrifice to the gods of marriage?

History is made not of facts set in stone but of the stories we tell.

But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

I never expected to find myself here, on the edge of the continent--childless, possibly jobless, with broken bones and a broken marriage, citizen of a broken country. But here I am, and I must make something of it. That's really the only choice one has: make something of it, or don't.

Some people have a gift for making you feel okay, just by the fact of their presence.

To be a writer you have to write – and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.