Wells Tower Quotes

“With fiction, there's no reason why everything you write shouldn't be amazing. Nobody's stopping you from making up better stuff.”

— Wells Tower

He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.

— Wells Tower

“If you were an animal, what would you be?" I wrote, "A bumblebee trying to fuck a marble.”

— Wells Tower

“It didn't make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.”

— Wells Tower

The bell on the cat's collar roused her. He'd brought her something: a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled and draped on Jacey's pillowcase. The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute.
Wild America

— Wells Tower

“The loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the dark evergreens. No planes disturbed the sky. I felt dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not.”

— Wells Tower

“The Brown Coast"
"Not long after the affair had run its course, Bob and his wife were driving to town when Vicky looked up and saw the phantom outline of a woman's footprint on the windshield over the glove box. She slipped her sandal off, saw that the print did not match her own, and told Bob that he was no longer welcome in their home.”

— Wells Tower

“Down Through the Valley"
"When Jane left me for Barry Kramer, it was a heavy kind of hurt, but by the time she took up with him, there wasn't a whole lot left for us. For quite a while, we'd been nothing but an argument looking for different ways to happen.”

— Wells Tower

“With two hours until her mother picked her up, Janey was alone, woozy and heart-swollen in the downtown, wandering wet streets that gleamed as you would have them gleam in the sweet summer film of your life.”

— Wells Tower

She was molten in my bed, but she also suffered depressions that were very dear to her.

— Wells Tower

“I was just kind of tripping out on what getting shot is all about. How it's just you getting touched by a little thing, only it's touching you really fast.”

— Wells Tower

“At times such as these, you get a good, humble feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there to enjoy it.”

— Wells Tower

“So what are you doing, any looting?"
"Why? You got anything to loot?"
"Me? Oh, no. Got a decent cookstove, but I can't see you toting that back on the ship."
"Don't suppose you've got a coin hoard or anything buried out back?"
"Jeezum crow, I wish I did have. Coin hoard, I'd really turn things around for myself.”

— Wells Tower

Retreat"
"I can't explain why I did these things, except to say that I carry a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother's wrath.

— Wells Tower

“It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne [Florida]
a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother's new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn't seem to have moods anymore, and she didn't fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons.”

— Wells Tower

“Over the years, I've made good money in real estate, and for some reason, this hurts Stephen's feelings. He's not a churchman, but he's extremely big on piety and sacrifice and letting you know what fine values he's got. As far as I can tell, these values consist of little more than eating ramen noodles by the case, getting laid once every fifteen years or so, and arching his back at the sight of people like me
that is, people who have amounted to something and don't smell heavily of thrift stores.”

— Wells Tower

“I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it's the fiction writer's job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in.”

— Wells Tower

I dug myself a garden, and a stray cat I grew to like would come around to sulk in the corn. I forced myself to seek new love, and for a while, I thought I'd found it with a girl from my office. She was molten in my bed, but she also suffered depressions that were very dear to her. She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth of feeling. I cut if off, then missed her, wishing that I'd at least had the sense to take her naked photograph.

— Wells Tower

Much time and money has gone into computer chess programs, and so far, no one's figured out how to crack the game, which I think speaks to chess's complexity.

— Wells Tower