Mona Simpson Quotes

27 quotes in 530 categories

• He was a man too busy to flush toilets.
• I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of…
• We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
• We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of…
• So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after
• Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good…
• Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.
• Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.
• Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.
• Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man…
• I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations.…
• Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have…
• In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota…
• Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.
• I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria,…
• When I was in high school in Los Angeles, my mother, who was a speech therapist, agreed to stay over the weekend with one of…
• In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon.…
• Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near…
• Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This…
• I do have food in my books. Different people eat different ways.

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