26 quotes found
Author · American · 1966
American author (born 1966)
“Books remember all the things you cannot contain.”
“Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.”
“Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.”
“Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human.”
“Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”
“I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.”
“Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying ju...”
“Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, an...”
“Im so sorry, he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, Im so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't bel...”
“All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When so...”
“The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.”
“Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccen...”
“Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to ...”
“Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.”
“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, ...”
“My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memori...”
“When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to ...”
“For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.”
“It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.”
“There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I ...”
“When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly diffic...”
“Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.”
