If we didn't love things, then we couldn't feel their loss. The flip side of loving is losing. I mean, you can't experience one without the other.

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson

I don't think of myself as fitting into a category. But I had to be careful in all of my books not to repeat things, because I have these ideas, and …

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Why is nostalgia such a bad thing? Nostalgia is a longing to return. If you really loved where you came from, if, in essence, you really loved yourse…

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson

There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subject…

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson

I'm not necessarily a happy person. I don't think that happiness is always the right response to a situation. I think we've come to a point in time w…

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson

I feel like human beings can't help but destroy, but if our numbers are small we don't destroy as much as we do when our numbers are this huge and ou…

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson

We're physical objects, we think of ourselves as these kind of free-floating brains, but the brain is such a little part. It's way smaller than we li…

- Melissa Holbrook Pierson