Quotes from Jennifer Haigh

It's hard to know, ever, where a story beings. We touch down in a world fully inhabited by others, a drama already in progress. By the time we make our entrance - incontinent and screaming, like dirty bombs detonating - the climax is a distant memory. Our arrival is not the beginning; it is a consequence.

It's just like Darren to worry about poor people in China while giving no thought to poor people in America, who need Walmart because they can't afford to shop anywhere else—a losers' club Rich feels, eternally, on the brink of joining, if he hasn't already.

That the woman was beautiful and dear to him, that he'd told her things he'd never told a living soul: this would have been more than enough even without the dreamlike echo of another moment, equally potent. For it seemed to him, the whole day long, that both reels were rolling at once, his boyhood and manhood, the indelible past and achingly tangible present. The boy he'd been and the man he was;

Was this a statement or a question? With teenage girls, it was hard to know. They seemed at every juncture to be looking for agreement, consensus, affirmation. To be reassured that they weren't wrong.

He looks out over his back yard, what's left of it. With the forest gone, the property looks smaller than sixty acres, stripped and shrunken like a dog in the bath. Behind the house, the crew left a single patch of grass, twenty foot square. Beyond lies a vast expanse of bare earth, dry and cocoa-colored, enclosed with chain-link fence. A bleak view, but not half as bad as what lies over the hill. The

Sewage treatment plants use disinfectants to kill bacteria.

are unsightly but eloquent, a timid girl's

Drug addiction and alcoholism, depression and anxiety, accidental pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. These conditions are believed to share a common etiology, the failure of virtue. Whatever their diagnosis, all Wellways patients have this in common: their troubles are seen to be, in part or in full, their own goddam fault.

Stomach issues aren't typical. But let me do some research." Trexler scribbles on a notepad. "What about breathing problems? That's usually what we see in cases of methane contamination." "She has asthma," Shelby says. Trexler's face lights. "There's a known connection between asthma and methane migration.

He kissed her hungrily, as if for nourishment. Later it would seem to him an act of cannibalism; the law he violated seemed nearly that ancient. But that night he was beyond reason, a man too long starved.

Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life—the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible—didn't trouble them at all.

A fetus had no thoughts or memories; it had made nothing, understood nothing. And yet, this mute, unthinking knot of tissue—alive, yes, but unformed, unconscious, incapable of tenderness or reasoning or even laughter—was the life that mattered. The woman carrying it, the complex creature formed by twenty or thirty years of living in the world, was simply the means of production. Her feelings about the matter, her particular ideas and needs and desires, didn't matter at all.

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

sooner or later you have to decide what you believe." It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice.

Destiny, she'd learned, was written in the heavens; a person couldn't take what the universe didn't wish to give.

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

When they touched it was like touching her own body. From childhood they had been the same height; their arms and legs and hands were still perfectly congruent. Only the centers of them were different, aching, fascinated, every part of them heated to the same temperature as the sun warmed pond.

I have great respect for writers who are humble, whose language allows the reader to see the story but doesn't get in the way. Language is a window, and if the window is clean, you shouldn't be aware you're looking through glass.

It wasn't her problem to solve; it was Kevin's. Let God fix him. After repeating the words for months, she finally understood what they meant. Let go and let God.

Her skin was as pale as milk. She must live on vanilla ice cream, Dinah thought; rounds of Camembert, crème anglaise.

His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in her mind — the tone of his voice, his hand on her shoulder. Soon the memory was worn as an old photograph, the edges fuzzy from frequent handling; she worried that she'd gotten the words wrong, forgotten some nuance of his face or voice. Finally she wondered if she'd made the whole thing up.

I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.