A.M. Homes Quotes

If you don't write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

— A.M. Homes

“Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.”

— A.M. Homes

“I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband's family name - she is in effect lost, evaporated from all records under her maiden name. I finally understand the anger behind feminism - the idea that as a woman you are property to be conveyed between your father and your husband, but never an individual who exists independently. And on the flip side, it is also one of the few ways one can legitimately get lost - no one questions it.”

— A.M. Homes

“Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.”

— A.M. Homes

“I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.”

— A.M. Homes

“I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They're four or five years long - that's not so bad. They're serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who's not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.”

— A.M. Homes

“I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.”

— A.M. Homes

“People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.”

— A.M. Homes

“How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?”

— A.M. Homes

“My mind leaps to my theory about presidents - that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short - and don't quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise - I believe blow jobs prevent war.”

— A.M. Homes

She lies on the stripped bed, looking up at the pinhole in the roof. The sky is blue. Clouds pass over. Sky, air, clouds, the sun and moon; it's fine. It's the same as it ever was. She stares at the small spot of blue. She sleeps. She dreams. She wakes up feeling a little more and a little less like herself.

— A.M. Homes

“Driving a Bentley to Target- only in LA does this make sense.”

— A.M. Homes

“Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?”

— A.M. Homes

“Silly bug, fly on the wall, our first fight and how quickly we are over it. Of course I don't hate you, dearest, beloved, most cherished, I owe you everything.”

— A.M. Homes

“Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so lily-white? The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find love and understanding-the more you feel entitled, allowed, even encouraged, to cheat, to lie, to steal, and then later, even to kill. That you're just beginning to feel it now only means you have been lucky for too long.”

— A.M. Homes

“He looked at Richard and the donut with great intensity, as if this were the donut that would fix Richard, as if there were certain donuts that were better for certain ailments, as if a donut could have curative powers.”

— A.M. Homes

“It's not about you it's about human behavior. You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that's so shocking"
I nod "I guess so"
"What's shocking," Cheryl says, "is that it doesn't happen more often. What's shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what's shocking is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. So-am I surprised that some lady drowns her children and shoots herself? No. I think it's sad; I wish people had noticed that she was struggling, I wish she could have asked for help. What shocks me is how alone we all are”

— A.M. Homes

“The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, "a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection".”

— A.M. Homes

“Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life ... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.”

— A.M. Homes

“I believe in staying open to possibility. What is the point of not believing, closing the door? Just leave it open, see what comes in.”

— A.M. Homes

“Can I ask you, what is your relationship to God?"
"Limited," I say. "Limited with the exception of spontaneous prayer in times of distress.”

— A.M. Homes

“Lillian comes out of the kitchen carrying an artefact, the blue metal tin marked Danish Butter Cookies that if I didn't know better I would swear had been in the family for generations - when the Jews left Egypt, they took with them the tins of Danish Butter Cookies. And tins, which as best as I could tell never included Danish Butter Cookies, traveled from house to house, but always, always found their way back to Lillian.”

— A.M. Homes

It's a strange city ... filled with things that are not obvious.

— A.M. Homes

“Today's the day. The clock is ticking. I have been summoned to speak. I go before the committee with a chance to exonerate myself, to extricate, or at least explain the debacle that has become my life.
A statement, a simple speech, a song and dance that will set them straight, an incandescent incantation, a charming presentation, a shoe of sorts, the show of shows, it's the only chance I've got. My appeal must be appealing, not entirely revealing, tucking the tendency to be argumentative, artfully augmenting my audacity with the acuity of my observation and the alarming accuracy of my action. What can I possibly say or do? Act normal.”

— A.M. Homes

“You can't collect everything," Pat says, putting the dress in with the giveaways. "Life is not a hobby.”

— A.M. Homes

And I can't help but wonder, did George want to kill me too? I have no doubt that the only thing that stopped him was narcissism-to kill me was also to kill some part of himself, which might also explain why Nate and Ashley survived.

— A.M. Homes

“You are your own beginning. Every day, every hour, every minute, you start again. There is no point wishing you were someone else, you are who you are-start there.”

— A.M. Homes

I think you can write about what you know for about an hour and a half. Then you have to start bullshitting. So I say, lie to me and lie to me well. The only way to write well is to write accurately. Accuracy is not about the reader, it's about the subject and the character.

— A.M. Homes

You talk with your feet.

— A.M. Homes

“Even in the wicked, disgusting sweats he put on every day after work, he looked like a movie star. It isn't the kind of stuff a kid normally says about his dad, but it was true; there was just something about him, a weird kind of confidence that made everyone turn around and look.”

— A.M. Homes

“Is contentment death? Does one need to want in order to live?”

— A.M. Homes

“You don't become a different person
you just learn to live with yourself
thats the hardest part.”

— A.M. Homes

A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so to speak. While he was buried deep in a muff, some sharp thing slipped, and his prize patient, Mrs Mavis Gilette, woke to find a harpoon hole in her cheek and her lost licker languishing on the floor.

— A.M. Homes

Anhil's coffee was hot, dark, full-flavored, perfect chasing the equally well-turned donut: golden brown, dense without being leaden, not too sweet.

— A.M. Homes

“Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve.”

— A.M. Homes

She starts to cry. 'It's just so terrible,' she says.
'Which part?,' I ask.
'Being human.

— A.M. Homes

“I wanted to drive. I wanted to keep going, forward. I wanted to break out onto the highway, put my foot to the floor, turn on the radio, and sing along.”

— A.M. Homes

“They stood there, staring at each other, swelling up the whole room. I remember the sudden strange sensation that these were not my parents, these were not the same people I'd known last week.”

— A.M. Homes

“Alice, I hand you her name gently, suggesting that if you hold it, carefully as I do, pressed close to the heart, you might at the end of this understand how confusing the beating of two such similar hearts can be and how one finally had to stop.”

— A.M. Homes

Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn't know what it is, there must be a reason why she's here in the first place. She lives because either she's not as brave as all the dead girls who've gone before her, or she's actually braver - it's hard to tell.

— A.M. Homes

“For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you've got to let go of the past.”

— A.M. Homes

“There are strangers, people we don't know, who care about is.”

— A.M. Homes

“I turned the steering wheel as far as I could. The old blue Volvo didn't believe in power steering.
"More," my father said.
I thought I was going to die. I thought I might have a heart attack. I thought if I ever had to drive that car, I'd end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"I think I'm having a heart attack," I said.
"What?"
"Never mind.”

— A.M. Homes

“I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?”

— A.M. Homes

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

— A.M. Homes

“I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.”

— A.M. Homes

“The weird thing about having your birthday on a school day is that by the time you get to be ten, or eleven for sure, no one at school knows it's your birthday anymore. It's not like when you're little and your mom brings cupcakes for the whole class. But even though no one knows, you walk around like it's supposed to be a national holiday. You walk around thinking that people are supposed to be nice to you, like maybe on your birthday you're ten times more breakable than on any other day. Well, it doesn't work that way. It just doesn't.”

— A.M. Homes

Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires
wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time.

— A.M. Homes

“The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,”

— A.M. Homes

“A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that's totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it's scary.”

— A.M. Homes