Dave

“He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Granier that here had come a fire stronger than God.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

“prayer is to religion what original research is to science,”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.

When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a the provincial adolescent.”
― Joan Didion, Political Fictions