Lisa Alther Quotations

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.

It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.

One didn't issue instructions to comets. Grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it.

Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects have to be undone.

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

A snake will always be a snake, even if you put a chain around its neck and try to make it walk upright.

Depression was a very active state really. Even if you appeared to an observer to be immobilized, your mind was in a frenzy of paralysis. You were unable to function, but were actively despising yourself for it.

The human organism has only so much energy at its disposal. If you divert a great deal of it into any one channel, you can expect the others to collapse or atrophy. If you squander your vital energies on your emotional life, as you have been doing, plan to be physically and mentally bankrupt, as it were.

The French would eat anything that couldn't outrun them.

The strength you've insisted on assigning to others is actually within yourself.

If you kept moving, you never had to mourn what you were leaving behind.

successful parenting was like log rolling, and she'd often landed in the drink.

The only obvious advantage to being an adult is that you can eat your dessert without haying sampled the vegetables.

If this was adulthood the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that she could now eat dessert without eating her vegetables.

What a surprise to find you could shift the contents of your head like rearranging furniture in a room.

The man who has no inner life is a slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.

Inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it.

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease.

Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

That's the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you. But other people who do will come along.