Quotes from Marisa Silver

But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

We grow, we mature, some of us give birth, we age, we die.

Tell me how you are." "I'm fine, Mother." "No one is fine. Fine is a placeholder.

A picture doesn't bring someone to life. A picture is a death of the moment when the picture is taken. Whenever you look at a picture, time dies again.

They had never had anything but now they had nothing. Mary realized how different those two conditions were.

the sorrow she carried around that made her smile come a second too late and made her ears grow dull so that her children would have to call her three or four times before they could get her attention.

What right did she have to take photographs of strangers? But she knew these faces....These people had been made to feel inadequate, abnormal. Their lives were disfigured by circumstance.

You'll know who you are when you start losing things,' Doris said.

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

But sometimes you can spend a lot of sorrow trying to change things for the better, when what was first was best. Its only you were too foolish to realize it.

For the first time, her singularity, the fact that she felt different from every person she knew, made sense to her, and she realized that no matter where she went in the world, she would have a point of view that no one else could possibly have.

The bones of his hand reminded her of the skeleton of a baby field mouse that Della had once found. It was completely intact, missing only its future.

She knew her death was near because time had begun to fold like a fan so that the past and the present rubbed together in ways that made her feel supple and porous, as if time were moving through her body and not the other way around.

The next day, Mary walked through the rubble of their destroyed house. They had never had anything but now they had nothing. Mary realized how different those two conditions were.

and feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love. In

This was what death would be, too, she imagined: a moment that would happen once and then recur each time it was encountered in memory,

She believes her parents do not love her less, only that before, she had a child's notion of love that did not include the small treacheries of delusion and fear and shame.

More often than not, superstition wins the day as it lifts the burden of responsibility off human shoulders and places it squarely on the much stronger ones of magic.

he] knows this, just as he knows that any story told about what has happened in the past can never be certain, that there is always yearning in the piecing together of information. The story of history is the story of its telling and its retelling. There are truths lost to time and desire.

The world moves on, and you are forgotten. Which is as it should be, I suppose. But sometimes you can spend a lot of sorrow trying to change things for the better when what was first was best. It's only that you were too foolish to realize it.

Walker studied the small, twitching motions of his

Such arrogance. A right of youth, he supposes, a necessity. How else is it possible to face the terrifying void of your unformed self except by claiming absolute intelligence?

Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?

But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.