Quotes from Elisa Albert

It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.

It's always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which.

The trick is to surrender completely, take your moments when you get them, don't dare want for more.

She developed a kind of disdain for her only sibling usually reserved for despotic political regimes and perpetrators of genocide.

One hundred years ago you'd have a child surrounded by other women: your mother, her mother, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law. And you'd be a teenager, too young to have had any kind of life yourself. You'd share childcare with a raft of women. They'd help you, keep you company, show you how. Then you'd do the same. Not just people to share in the work of raising children, but people to share in the loving of children.

Are you some kind of witch? Yup, I reply, and stare him down.

Falling in love often is crucial. You just have to let it nourish you without giving in to it. Why turn it off entirely? Why deaden any part of yourself? Won't death do that for you, and soon enough?

Muted pain, it turns out, is much worse than clear pain. Clear pain is quantifiable. One can face it, reckon with it, come away braver. There is no way to understand what you cannot feel. No reckoning to be had. It will haunt you forever, make you afraid. Still, they call her this laughable word: Survivor.

Volumes upon volumes on exploration, war, violence, the life-threatening transformative journeys of man. But you can't talk about this. The fucking, the sadness, the dark, the blood, the light. They will burn you at the fucking stake for this shit.

Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck.

A baby opens you up, is the problem. No way around it unless you want to pay someone else to have it for you. There's before and there's after. To live in your body before is one thing. To live in your body after is another. Some deal by attempting to micromanage; some go crazy; some zone right the hell on out. Or all of the above.

People dont want to hear about that, dont want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as a supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo.

No scrim, no filter, no bullshit. She wasn't all bound up in there, gagged and furious and resentful beneath some high-pitched shrink-wrapped mess of pleasantry.

Paul's wanting does not hinge on anything other than the fact of me. This is an excellent trait in a man.

These tiny people, they're not about you. They are not for you. They do not belong to you. They are under your care, is all, and it's your job to work at being a decent human being, love them well and a lot, dont put your problems on them, dont make your problems thier problems, dont use them to occupy empty parts of yourself.

I understood early that I'd find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that. But

book. I understood early that I'd find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that. But

Siblings, more than parents, more than teachers and friends and lovers and pets, shape the people we are.

It's always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which. Got

A matter, as the famous book intoned, of finding the shade of the parachute that best complemented you. But really: With no parachute at all you'd hit the pavement so hard it probably wouldn't even hurt, and you'd unleash a whole new color palate-bone, blood, muscle-in the process.

For as long as wimmin have had the temerity to experience feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and deep resentment, patriarchal society has denied them these feelings, and, in fact, punished them heartily for feeling anything at all.

There are moments of the most crazy all-encompassing joy. What a phenonenally beautiful kid. A funny, dear child. Kind and open and loving.

A deceptively simple blues for when you need to be brought back to earth, reminded who you are. The song opened and opened and kept on opening. You could dance to it, drop down into your pelvis, let it make you funnier, funkier, smarter, skankier, snarkier, stankier. Listen to how smart this girl is! How self-aware and funny. A step ahead of everyone else.

A special voice, an arresting voice, impossible to ignore. She didn't always hit precise notes—she wasn't some formalist, some scientist, some striver—but she sang from her gut and she meant it. Her voice a living organism: no song ever, ever the same twice.