Quotes from Laura Kasischke

For his birthday, she'd bought him an iPhone, which he'd returned to the store. He'd apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn't want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone.

if you sing a sad song loud enough, the boys on those torpedo boats can hear you under the sea.

But, perhaps, I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air- looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged. I could smell the death between them.

I am the impossibility of desiring the person you pity. And the petal of the Easter lily—

The letters, the fading. The labyrinth, the cake. The four hundred brackish lakes of the brain. She searches for the music, but she can't find it. Oh, God, it was here only the other day.

The veterinarian looked at Buttons for a few seconds, and then he looked up at Karen. He cleared his throat. He said, "Ma'am, I don't know how to tell you this, but—Buttons—Buttons isn't a dog.

Shouldn't the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too—that moving on? Shouldn't there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who'd been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare

backs. Followed by the traditional Burning of the Gifts. Everyone would gather to watch the toaster and blender explode. Followed by the sacrificial drowning of a bridesmaid, the one who'd caught the fucking bouquet?

And I still walk the sidewalk mumbling something about how it will all be fine Fine is its own crazy village on the Rhine Fine is the name of the cuckoo-clock maker Fine is the word the cuckoo cries every hour after hour on the hour— scrambling out of its dark little hole like something being chased with a knife by Time

The heart hacked out of the center of an overgrown hedge with an ax To live beyond the brain

The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It's like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh.

Maybe, I think, when you've waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women.

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you'd crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.

and the stones, bewitched, can see: The lost hours and into the past.

Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could life the lid and precious gems would spill over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy- an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.

And the box inside him in which his mother resides is velvet and black and without size.

A knife plunged into the center of summer. Air and terror, which become teeth together.

My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees.

Hidden in the works of a mysterious clock are her many deaths, and yet the whole world is piled up before her on a banquet table again today. The timer, broken.

Well, I keep forgetting. You never listened to my suggestions. Never asked for my advice. When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

The last hour waiting patiently on a tray for her somewhere in the future. The spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.

To live . I'm not endorsing it.

And, for the first few months after her surgeries, Holly had felt, horribly, as if she'd been turned into a machine, an unkillable robot. She had terrible dreams in which she was searching for her body parts on shelves lined with thousands of other body parts, floating in thousands of jars. In the dreams, Holly was convinced that her soul had been located in one of those body parts, and now her soul was trapped for eternity in formaldehyde and glass.