Best 18 quotes of Kathleen Rooney on MyQuotes

As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.

Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.

If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.

In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction.

Not to give too big of a spoiler, but I never find myself thinking, for example, Oh, remember that crazy time I stumbled on that closeted Republican candidate's sex tape?

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving. ... Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

All right, all right," he said, with that gesture I'd come to hate: two open palms facing me and patting the air, as if pushing me away, pushing me down, pushing any tears I might be preparing to cry back into their ducts.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity— one’s own and others’— but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, 'I wouldn't count on it.

I am old and all I have left is time. I don't mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think.

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.

I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.

The way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline." He'd been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy's, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.