Quotes from Debra Dean

You're unusual. That's better than popular if you have some courage.

She is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves.

What is heartbreaking is that there is still beauty in the world.

Each day, the world is made fresh again, holy, and she takes it in, in all its raw intensity, like a young child. She feels something bloom in her chest—joy or grief, eventually they are inseparable. The world is so acutely beautiful, for all its horrors, that she will be sorry to leave it.

You should not give your whole heart to anything mortal, daughter.

Whatever is eating her brain consumes only the fresher memories, the unripe moments

But now I know, while beauty lives So long will live my power to grieve.

Once she had thought that she might discover some key to her mother if only she could get her likeness right, but she has since learned that the mysteries of another person only deepen, the longer one looks.

Whatever we know as children, this is the world, eaten whole and without question.

is eating her brain consumes only the fresher memories, the unripe moments. Her distant past is preserved, better than preserved. Moments that occurred in Leningrad sixty-some years

I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply.

He nods solemnly and repeats the stock response of the Housing Committee whenever they address the perpetual shortage of apartments in Leningrad. "Privacy is a conceit of degenerate societies.

it is on the ninth day after death that the soul is said to leave the body. On the fortieth day, it departs this world. Between these two points lies a blank space that the Church does not account for, but peasants will tell you that the soul returns home and takes up residence behind the stove.

Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.

I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space.

You're unusual. That's better than popular if you have some courage.