Quotes from Lily King

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist.

My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you've coaxed it out of her, it's hard not to always believe it. I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It's different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don't know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don't know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.

Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. —Ruth Benedict

Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress", so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature

I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that's still inside me.

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.

Tears are not endless.

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain.

Becca, though, I married. I don't know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.

He kissed where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught. I believed she'd sent him to me as a gift to help me through.

She laughed. 'Was she wine or bread to you?' 'What do you mean?' 'It's from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.

Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality.' '"Between the idea and the reality/Between the motion and the act/Falls the Shadow,

I'm both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.

God, you poets are full of shit. You have no idea what half the words you worship mean.

The geese are all asleep. A few tip their heads out from under their wings as we approach. I open the cookie tin and a few more sway slowly over to us. It's cold, and Silas has wrapped the green blanket around me so I feel like I have wings, too.

I'll miss them when they take flight. I won't be there. Their fast excited chatter, their wings finally spread wide, their feet tucking in behind them. Wheels up. I'll miss it. I'll be in class or at my desk or in bed when they cut across the sky.

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

Halfway across the river I hoist myself on the wide parapet, swing my legs over the edge, and look down in the water for Quentin's body. How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she's ever known? How do you create a character like that?

All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams.

That night at Gertie's when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn't say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn't know the difference then.

There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people.