Greater than scene ... is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human be...ing, who will never be confined in any frame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the ke...ystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural... wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the th...reads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... my mother ... piled up her hair and went out to teach in a one-room school, mountain children little and big alike. The first ...day, some fathers came along to see if she could whip their children, some who were older than she. She told the children that she did intend to whip them if they became unruly and refused to learn, and invited the fathers to stay if they liked and she'd be able to whip them too. Having been thus tried out, she was a great success with them after that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would ...have eloped with him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose ...it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »