Quotes from Maile Meloy

They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.

It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica')

and braking

Our work is an ongoing struggle with unintended consequences. We must try to narrow the gap, which is sometimes a gulf, between what we intend and the results we achieve.

But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?

Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip.

Benjamin called it "estro-lock," the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.

His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.

To be a kid is to be invisible and to listen, and to interpret things that aren't necessarily meant for you to hear--because how else do you find out about the world?

His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.

She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

Now, alone on the roof, Valentine looked at her shoes and wished people would either stay or go away, but not constantly coming back and leaving again.

At the simplicity of the gesture, he felt a pang: the raw nerve of his loneliness exposed.

Whenever we tamper with natural laws, there are consequences," the count said. "The larger the disruption, the larger the consequence.

Children were experiments, and his had failed.

I guess if everyone was blind, and you tried to describe vision to them, it would sound crazy and made up.

Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.

We're creating little hedonists,' Frank used to say. 'Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They'll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.

He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out.

I baptize you in the name of the conservation of energy. What comes around goes around.

He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become him. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was.

All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.

He held his hands tightly together and cursed his daughter for bringing the terrible world, with its humiliation and longing, back to his door.