Quotes from Laura Kasischke

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren't accompanied by regret.

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

your life can change in an instant. that instant can last forever.

No one is going to hear what she says whether she speaks or not. Simply she could close her eyes and never speak again. She could suck all of the air in this room-every dust mote, every atom-into her body and hide it inside her…

We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man.

Scratch the surface, and there's just more surface—chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.

The first shot causes warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain…a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is.

She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily. The hall light shone in my eyes. There was a halo in her hair. It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.

She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space- all meteors, no atmosphere.

Behind him there's still the mirror…a bit of infinity, which in its disinterest still holds their reflections safely in it.

A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire.

Being female was so hard. Always having to rearrange yourself, to pluck yourself and whittle yourself and deprive yourself and inspect yourself in order to feel comfortable in this world.

July, that lovely hell, all velvet dresses and drapes stuffed into a hot little hole.

There's April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is... friendship. There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does, love.

The first time I had sex with a man for money, it was September.

But the future bores me. I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic. I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.

Mr. McCleod: And if there's anything I want you guys to take with you from this class, as you're abusing your bodies over break, is three things: the heart is the body's strongest muscle, that the brain has more cells in it than our galaxy has stars, and that the body is 72% water. So wherever you go over vacation, don't get too dehydrated.

When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

And this letter I didn't send how surprising to find it now. All this love I must have felt.

Something wild was going on in that coffin….I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

The blond stuffs her hairbrush, which is now spun with gold and black silk (a miniature angel's nest) back into her backpack next to her anthology of English literature. The pages are so thin, they're like dead girls' dreams, translucent skin. On them it seems that everything that has ever been thought has been written.

And all the embezzled cents and dollars of the last time I saw you.