Quotes from Elise Juska

She thought about how it was something they would all remember forever. How this was family: to own such moments together. To experience them in all their raw shock and sadness, then get the food from the refrigerator, unwrap the crackers and fill the glasses, keep the gears turning, the grand existing beside the routine, the ordinary.

The truth is that life in the end--even a long life, especially a long life--amounts to a handful of a very few things. The longer you live, the shorter the story.

grew up in Philadelphia and still live there. Is The Blessings autobiographical or otherwise informed by your experiences there? The characters in The Blessings are fictional, but the rhythms and rituals of this close family were certainly influenced

This, she thought, was the sadness of teachers. Each semester is a contained little life - a relationship that begins, peaks, but always ends. They cycle in, cycle out, but you stay in one place. The teacher grows older, but the students never age. They are perpetually eighteen, twenty-one, lives always just on the cusp of beginning. You watch them walk off into the world, knowing you helped them become what they're becoming. You suffer the same ending again and again.

Everything is a matter of perspective, she told them. Every story of what happened is just a version of what happened. Memory is subjective. Fact and truth are two different things.