Quotes from Helen Phillips

and one of those neat spiral stairways in the far corner-I wonder where it leads. Spiral staircases always seem to me like they must lead somewhere special.

It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices.

Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. —JORGE LUIS BORGES, "The Zahir

I just want to feel immaculate for a few minutes a day

Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened/melted, maddened/melted, maddened/melted.

Molly wanted to sway to sleep in the hammock of her children's breathing.

She and David had a running joke about how they both feared their kids at night the same way that, as children, they'd feared monsters under the bed. Beasts that would rise up from the side of your bed, seize you with sharp nails and demand things of you.

Trishiffany said. "And your child was the 129,285,656,702nd." "Do you know how many hours I spent sneaking around here in the middle

Kitchen-sink cookies, Trishiffany proclaimed. Sounds disgusting, right? But I've always been so torn about chocolate chips versus butterscotch chips, but here you don't even have to choose. Walnuts and peanuts! Oatmeal and cornflakes! Raisins and dried cherries. Not to mention the shredded coconut. Sometimes we just need our little freedoms, you know?

A life lived in fear is a life half-lived

It puzzled her that orgasm wasn't widely considered a phenomenon that challenges everything we believe about human existence—doesn't it serve as proof of an alternate state of being? Isn't the fact that people can feel this way, so in thrall to this enigmatic force, so carried by it, even for an instant, evidence that the state in which we spend most of our time is merely one possibility?

It was with some pride that she screwed the tops onto the bottles of milk. Nearly four ounces in each. She pressed the pair of bottles, warm with her milk, against her cheeks. Partway the accomplishment of an animal, partway the accomplishment of a deity.