Quotes from Joan Silber

This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.

A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.

If you saw through everything, it made it hard to figure out what to do with yourself.

Slowed time is -- or should be -- a way of pointing to what's important.

This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.

S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

People always went for the romantic interpretation; you couldn't blame them for that. What they felt most strongly seemed most true. But other forces were operating in the world.

A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.

Fierce loyalty. That's how the Kurds survived for two and a half thousand years while the Hitties and the Phrygians died out. Communal Loyalty.

Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.

But people often wanted payment for what they only wished they'd done.

You don't know what you're going to be faithful to in this world, do you? It was true I didn't have what other people had, I knew that, and yet I couldn't think of a single other life I envied - no, I couldn't - though I knew better than to try to get anyone to believe it.

So, in the end, we were hypocrites for kindness. Both of us. Standing with my bouquet of orange blossoms, I thought: I'm happy but I'm in disguise. But probably many people feel that at their weddings.

Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape.

He had never lied to me, as far as I knew. But did I know anything?

If anyone had unfinished business, he did. If anyone needed more time, he did. He was going to wander for years at the edge of my line of sight.

I could picture him gray and gaunt, looking out from an armchair, braving the worst. I knew how he'd be; I knew him. He'd be glad to see me by then, more than glad. I could feel myself wishing it were that time now.

I liked my floaty, superior life more than I could have admitted. I liked the remote spaces I was settling into. I liked looking down from above — the calm of it. I kept this preference to myself. Mostly.

And how could the Internet bring him to her, if he wasn't showing up on his own two feet?

Get over yourself - You are not the center of the universe.' 'Understand that life itself (and emotions) are impermanent.

there was a real kiss—a sudden revelation of him in tongue and lip.

There's no justice in who dies

He sent Leah a text--*truck fine miss u like always april too all my lv*--and none of it was a lie. There were burning truths in that message.

His best moment was when he walked up the majestic stairway to the second floor of the Met; he loved the glorious spaces of old exhibition halls. Not that they knew about old here, with buildings always being blasted and rebuilt higher. How did people in this city keep track of themselves, with so much coming at them at once?