Safe from the Neighbors is a novel of unusual richness and depth, one that's as wise about the small shocks within a marriage as it is about the troubled history of Mississippi. Steve Yarbrough is a formidably talented novelist, shuttling between the past and present with a grace that feels effortless.
I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
We ought to know about our culinary past. Food and identity is terribly important ... I don't mean we should go out and eat historic dishes, but we should know what makes us different ... self-confident nations have that sense of where they come from.
Anyone with a long-term partner, anyone with a long-term lover, if that lover dies, you could easily see yourself in a situation where you couldn't see your future and you would be living entirely in the past. It's about that loss.
My now-wife - we got together in '81, we married a few years after - she's been very good in the past about going in the theater with me to see actresses I had known. But then, she's not an actress.
I keep saying that backwards is all you can see. You can't see front. My wife says, "Stop, you're always in the past." She sees me sort of daydreaming.
I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.
For me, New Jersey is kind of a mythical place. It's emblematic of a certain aspect of American life. Florida is the same way. It's where people go to recreate, to reinvent themselves. It's what California used to be. I think Florida is still a place to erase the past.
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.
Stained is about a lonely bookshop keeper, and her past comes back to haunt her. I play a femme fatale, schizophrenic serial killer. They offered me the part and I was like, "I'm just curious why you thought I would be perfect for this role," and the director (Karen Lam) said, "You have this look that, when you're smiling, you're really sweet, but when you're not smiling, you look like you could kill somebody."
No further issues with Corinne Bishop or her kin in Detroit?” “Hunter didn’t seem to be concerned,” Gideon replied. “Said he had the situation under control.” Lucan grunted, wry despite the weight of the discussion previously under way. “Where’ve I heard that line before? Famous last words from more than one of us over the course of the past year and a half.
I'm at the point now where I don't really have an agenda. I kind of let things flow, and there's not a narrative. On the set it's usually one or two people, and I'm not trying to choreograph them as I did in the past. I'm really just trying to see what's going on in their minds and in their faces.
Shooting great-grandchildren of some of the people I had photographed in the past, who are around the age of 15, is fascinating to me, because they're right on this fine line between still being children and starting to become themselves.
Are you ready? I'm three blocks past ready. Pardon? Skip it.
I would like to assist these beings who aren't aware that they are actually to assist nature so that they are able to fully realise themselves to be that which they are to become. Luckily for me I prepared the way for others who don't understand themselves by pushing past all limitations and standing up. I prepared the way for those who are not aware of what is to step forth in their lives as their purpose and who are unable to place themselves without forgetting what they are here to do.
In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.
It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.
Who wants to be reputable? That's for golfers and tycoons with a sleazy past.
Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.
I was at sea the other day and loads of meat floated past. It was a bit choppy.
It is past time for the U.S. government to fully fulfill our moral obligation to those who have fought for freedom and democracy.
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.
For me, there's a tremendous challenge of singing with Faith, who, in my opinion is one of the best singers in the world. She doesn't get enough credit for being as good as she is. She's so beautiful that people look past her singing. But for a journeyman like me to keep up with her is a real tough sprint.
The future and the past are equally meaningless because they are nebulous entities, times that do not exist, containing events which have no echo because they are gone, or which hold no import because they are yet to happen. What is important is the here and now, and now, and now, and the spaces between the nows.
There's no denying that the way horror has been packaged in the past has done it no favours. Lurid black covers adorned with skulls, corpses crawling with insects and scantily clad maidens being chewed into by vampires -- all good clean fun, but it doesn't do much to give the genre an air of respectability or seriousness to the casual browser.
