John Burnham Schwartz

There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.

— John Burnham Schwartz

Beyond the terrace, a light breeze stirred the reeds at the edge of the pond. Looking out at this intimate vista, one…

— John Burnham Schwartz

Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.

— John Burnham Schwartz

“Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for…

— John Burnham Schwartz

Certain experiences you never forget, no matter how old you become.

— John Burnham Schwartz

For a couple of years at the end of the 1970s, Dustin Hoffman was a fixture in our family. My father was…

— John Burnham Schwartz

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“Why? What had she ever done? What had any of them ever done? To give a child only to take him away.…

— John Burnham Schwartz

Anyone who loved Tuesdays with Morrie should delight in reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Mitch Albom has populated his…

— John Burnham Schwartz

It is one thing to recognise certain potentially useful affinities, and another to act on them.

— John Burnham Schwartz

In Japan, more than in any other country I've ever been in, one is not supposed to write about the people in…

— John Burnham Schwartz

The difference between great actors and the rest of us isn't simply that they know how to make more out of less,…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“I sat thinking. How it was she who'd mentioned love first. How she seemed to be waiting, the door still between us,…

— John Burnham Schwartz

Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do,…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“She was Mattie Tucker now, mother of three and a good forty pounds heavier, casting that burning eye over them all, reaching…

— John Burnham Schwartz

I was 12. Our ,teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make…

— John Burnham Schwartz

A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.

— John Burnham Schwartz

Let me begin by saying that I am one of those naturally wary people who considers the verb 'return' a kind of…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of…

— John Burnham Schwartz

The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“life is not an echo, endlessly returning the past to us so that we might read and reread in its fading variations…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“By almost every account he's a fine young man. I'm simply trying to figure out why I should care that he's three…

— John Burnham Schwartz

“There was before her and now there is after her, and that is the difference in my life.”

— John Burnham Schwartz