Quotes from Elizabeth McCracken

I'm a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office.

Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.

I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book.

The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers.

I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single.

The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar.

It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.

I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over.

Engagements - they are like a prayer before eating, best quick.

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

Books remember all the things you cannot contain.

People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don't dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what's revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?

People think they're interesting. That's their first mistake.

but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy.

Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't everyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? . . .Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.

As for me, I believe that if there's a God - and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible - then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

Other people's happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you're left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn't ever noticed.

It's a happy life and someone is missing.