Kyle Minor > Quotes

“Mistakes were made long ago. It is someone else's fault. We can't be held responsible, but we are very sorry.”
― Kyle Minor

“I am a very slutty reader.”
― Kyle Minor

“The very face of evil was love.”
― Kyle Minor

“She had always feared she might die alone, but she was not alone.”
― Kyle Minor

“WE BEGIN WITH THE TROUBLE, but where does the trouble begin? My uncle takes a pistol and blows his brains out.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“Our job is to identify the distance between the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our lives—the received story, or the romantic story, or the wishful thinking—and replace it with the story that experience is revealing about our lives, the story that is more true.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“It’s like Kazuo Ishiguro said: “I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“Your shoes, mother,” he said. He had never called her mother, not in his whole life.”
― Kyle Minor, In the Devil's Territory

“You’re entitled to it, and we’ll give it to you if you want, but what you need to know is sometimes what you want isn’t the same as the thing we can give you.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“Nothing new can happen here, so all you do is think about the days of life when possibility hadn't been ripped from you forever, when anything could happen, and wonder why so much was squandered, so much wasted.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk

“AM DEEPLY, DEEPLY AFRAID. Subtract seventeen years from my twenty-nine. I am twelve years old, standing beneath a starfruit tree, standing on an asphalt path lined with banyan trees, their roots extending from ground to sky to ground again and forming great pockets of wild, empty space in the center of their root-branches.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“It seemed to him that this dark quarter acre of death and assignation would go on and on whispering to him secrets he did not want to hear as long as he had the strength to listen.” —William Gay”
― Kyle Minor, In the Devil's Territory

“The sweet life,” the preacher said. “Is made of bitter parts.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“There is probably something weird about you, about what you want to do, about how you want to do it. You’re probably not pulling it off yet. But the one piece of advice you should immediately ignore is the suggestion that you shear off the rough edges, regularize, de-complicate, become like whatever the advisor thinks everybody ought to be. Don’t do that. Be yourself. Be weird. Be singular. When the time comes, the thing that will lodge your work in the mind and heart of the readers for whom it will mean so much is the thing that right now is causing people to say the crippling words: No. Don’t. Can’t. Stop”
― Kyle Minor

“On the cover of this book, it says “Fiction.” A: That’s what people write when they want to get away with telling the truth.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“he takes pleasure in the sorting, and even more, perhaps, in the new knowledge that he is a person who can sort.”
― Kyle Minor, In the Devil's Territory