21 Quotes by Norman Rush

It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

Small breasts are best for the long haul.

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.

I feel like someone after a deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I’m still plucking seaweed out of my hair.

What I was suddenly afraid of was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion.

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you’re interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it’s time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.