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" My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments. "

Amy Bloom

Parents

Holocaust

History

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" It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It's not because anyone in their right mind says, 'You know, what's the most fascinating thing in the world?' It's because you need something new that happens every week in a frame. "

" It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often. "

" I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we don't always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel. "

" To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever. "

" I am interested in struggle - between our hearts and our head, between principle and desire - and one of those struggles is with mortality; and no one at all is immune to it, which makes it even more interesting to me. Some people fall in love, some don't. Some sky dive, some don't. Everyone who lives, ages. "

" I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around. "

" I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment. "

" I don't think writers really choose their subjects. I think the subjects, the topics, the themes, choose us, and then we make the most of what we have. For Trollope, society; for Roth, Jews. For me, apparently, love. Why hide it? "

" I do my business in the morning, and then at 2 P.M., I write fiction for the rest of the day. I like my husband, so I don't work at weekends. "

" Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it's a story that's on a stage, but there's a different sort of tension that appears on stage - you get to see your characters in a different way - like with lights. "

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" My father certainly believed that one could make a living outside of an office, as he did. And that if I didn't want to work for other people, there wasn't any reason why I had to. He conveyed that very strongly to my sister and I - that smart people can make their own livings. "

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" People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans. "

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" We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating. "

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