Quotes from Timothy Schaffert

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.

You were young, I thought, not once but always before, always always, every day before the day just passed. You were young only minutes ago.

Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page.

Kindness to your family costs you almost nothing but affords a wealth of goodwill.

A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don't dance, they don't sway. That's not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God's love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself." (48)

After we ate our heaping slice of humble pie, we asked the missus if she could at least serve it up a la mode next time.

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.

But they simply didn't know Sammy in the late hours, all his virulent bedtime prayers whispered away into his folded hands, releasing his worry and anxiety over the sinful so he could sleep well and fight the devil again in the daylight. And, easefully and kindly, he'd hold Abby in his arms, becoming just as lost as everyone else, just as blind in the dark.

He took from his coat pocket a handful of wadded-up cash, as if children had paid him directly with their sweaty clutches of dollar bills.

Sometimes the right scent is the one that seems all wrong. Sometimes a woman goes into a perfume shop seeking adaptation. Or metamorphosis. Or an outright lie. if you can convince a client just a little bit, he'll convince himself the rest of the way. He wants so much to believe. Faith. It's vital in both thievery and perfume. Perfume was the most exquisite fraud of all - a pretty little bottle of cheap fixings and alcohol that you sold for at least triple its worth.

people feel they can be revealing around me, that they can unbutton their lips and let slip intimate facts ad trust that I have the maturity to keep my mouth shut.

Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.

Every day I carry the weight of your absence" The Perfume Thief