Sandra Newman > Quotes

“Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.”
― Sandra Newman, How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide

“Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me. ”
― Sandra Newman, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done: A Novel – Identity, Inheritance, and Family Secrets

“All great works start with mistake. Ain’t no exception in this fact.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“He says nothing, vehemently. I falter away and we sit, mutually staring into the fouled water. ...


With time to kill, I ponder dismally the possible derivation of the zombie myth from people like my boyfriend. I picture Ralph blackened, semi-fingered, with bright bone peeking through his flesh. The odd small worm clings, festively wiggling. In my image, Ralph's really upset about decaying, and I feel for him sorrowfully. I want to tell him I would still love him, if he were decomposed. Of course in practice there is no predicting what I'd feel, and besides which, it's a wild associative leap.


I ponder dismally how I've alienated people, all my life, with my bizarre associative leaps. ”
― Sandra Newman, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done: A Novel – Identity, Inheritance, and Family Secrets

“Not everyone is meant to change the world. We let the world change around us. We let it die if it will. We live small lives, constrained by habit and fear.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“It was beautiful to be heartbroken, it was as pleasurable as a thing could be. But pointless.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“When I been small, once Driver told me cricket singing was the voice of stars.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“That sense of the world being the lack of something dogged him for years, and when it stopped dogging him, he felt unmoored. ”
― Sandra Newman, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done: A Novel – Identity, Inheritance, and Family Secrets

“Then we all sat around; we were supposed to be awed. I was brattishly unawed.”
― Sandra Newman, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done: A Novel – Identity, Inheritance, and Family Secrets

“Once she asked if it made him feel better to know more than other people. He said tartly, “My feelings don’t matter in the least. What matters is what’s true.”
― Sandra Newman, Julia

“There were others like her. Of course there were. How had she ever thought there would not be?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“At last he had risen to hold forth tragically about the misfortune that it was to be alive.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Then my tears come blinding, and he lead me by the arm. I stumble in the elevator, thinking of that moon rain. Salt that last forever, grief that live beyond all life.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“She couldn't know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn't be anyone, but she could still love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“It was night, and the sky spreading into a rain that fell like darkness visible, a glistering where there was no light.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“In Winston’s dream, his woman would agree to any moral enormity, if it was what he wished.”
― Sandra Newman, Julia

“Because crazy people weren’t weaker than you—he’d often thought this about his mother—they were stronger. They outlasted you, even when they died. They would tread you underfoot without noticing.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“You really don't understand what it's like to have bad parents, do you?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Nonetheless, it left him with a terrible doubt, a fear that inhabited every scene.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Every pain be gold.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“So he thinks he has a baby and everything falls into place? What gets me is, people have babies and they're thinking what the baby will do for them. It's sick.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“And after all, belief was a beautiful thing. That was the trouble with atheists (Kate thought); they might be right, but their unbelief was utilitarian, bleak, like a Brutalist building.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She could hide in this small, dull life.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Yo, I feel this been the truth of all our time together. We always been a grief that huddle close against a vicious light.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“He wear a roo suit - grey-green dapple thing, ain't satisfy to be one ugly color, it be ugly twice.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“Sweet wine from Spain and gossip from France; the sun in the windows dimmed, sorrowed prettily as the day declined, until the candles' light was mirrored in the glass. Their dabbling flames were like guesses at a feeling, the hearth's fire like the feeling itself. It was a beautiful pastime she had missed; hours that had stepped light-footed on Emilia's memory and passed on.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“The dream was strongest of all when Kate's heart was broken. Then she fell asleep as if falling out of life, and the dream became numinous as real things are numinous, vivid even as it blankly slept. She couldn't prove it even to her own satisfaction, but she felt the dream was quickened by love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Is only skew insanities, how God survive when we all kilt. How any person worship gods, when gods ain’t even brave to die.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“You have to understand, it's how we are here. It's like we're all asleep. We grow up, we fall asleep, and then the horrors that scared us before - we're doing them. We're the monsters in the nightmare.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star