Quotes from Lydia Millet

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

More than two million years ago, mammoths and Asian elephants took different evolutionary paths - and around the same time, according to DNA research, so did their lumbering relatives in Africa.

I've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?

At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.

Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it's our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.

To hear Chip talk you'd think every Nebraskan male knows how to put a horseshoe on a mule. They know how to bring forth grain from dirt, or what a combine harvester is. They get what happens to that brought-forth grain, the steps before the Cheerios. The women knit long underwear and are adept at fruit canning.

That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.

His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which "values the sanctity of every human soul," and also "believes in the greatness of the American family." The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren't you.

She gazed right through it to the future, another time and place without this jangling cascade of arbitrary noise.

I don't like names that are clever or made-up sounding.

And freedom, that sacred cow that was always invoked as an excuse for bad behavior, all manner of atrocity—what was it, even? They told you to love it, in the schools and the songs, but never said what it was. Possibly, to many of them, all it meant was the right to have money. Or get more of it.