Best 18 quotes of Nancy Horan on MyQuotes

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. -Loving Frank

I love you so much. I love you enough that I want to stay separate from you. You're an extraordinary man, Frank Wright. I could so easily lose myself in your world and never make a world of my own. And where would that leave us? We'd both be bored stupid.

In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me.

It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.

What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. And something else... books.

A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.

But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was.

It seemed to me that boys had a lot more fun. It was a relief. I didn't look at myself from the outside. I just lived inside my skin, looking out.

It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.

Louis suspected each of them, in his or her own way, was an exile – from bourgeois values, family crests, unhappy love affairs, childhoods too long spent in church pews. He wondered if they had started as social outcasts who found the artist’s life an acceptable way to be in the world; or if their passions for painting or sculpting or writing had shaped them into outsiders. He had never been quite sure how the chicken-versus-egg question played out in his own life.

[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky--'the hem of heaven.

Two years in a child's life is the distance between stars.

Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.