Quotes from Lydia Millet

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

No one bought my screenplays.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.

What makes 'The Lorax' such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.

Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.

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.

For him freedom meant doing exactly what you wanted all the time. Was that freedom for everybody?

America had once ruled the earth, he said. But it had never bothered to educate its people. So now it was a country of ignorant peasants, a noisy and stupid rabble.

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.

See this, Juice? Science comes from nature. It's kind of a branch of it. Like Jesus is a branch of God. And if we believe science is true, then we can act. And we'll be saved. Juicy stuck a bleeding finger in his mouth. Saved like, go to heaven? Holmes, that's some Santa Claus shit. ...No. Like the earth. The climate. The animals, said Jack. Heaven's part of the code. It just means, a good place for us all to live.