Occupation: Author
With FIVE DAYS, Douglas Kennedy has crafted a brilliant meditation on regret, fidelity, family, and second chances that will have you breathlessly tu….
You don't have to have one emotion at a time..
Evil almost always starts with small cruelties..
In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God….
One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books hav….
If I'd waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything..
We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one..
What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn't the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum….
...in the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of….
But it takes so little to help people, and people really do help each other, even people with very little themselves. And it’s not just about second ….
That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselve….
And my first item on each day's list is this: Wake up. If I can check that off, I've already done something and can get on with the business of livin….
The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention..
It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you….
In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conv….
Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying..
As a reader, you’re often inside one or more character heads, so you know what they’re feeling, even if they can’t exactly say it, or they say it so ….
We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it's not owing like a debt to one person--it's really that we owe everyone for ever….
If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic fl….
You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them..
I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same….