Quotes from Elizabeth McCracken

But you cannot fly away from people who have flown away from you; you cannot fly into your own arms.

Don't trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth.

Though my love for you is infinitesimal, your eyes are as dewey as any old decimal.

She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.

Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.

Blame is a compulsive behavior, the emotional version of obsessive hand washing, until all you can do is hold your palms out till your hands are full of it, and rub, and rub, and accomplish nothing at all.

All librarians, deep down, loathe their buildings. Something is always wrong—the counter is too high, the shelves too narrow, the delivery entrance too far from the offices. The hallway echoes. The light from windows bleaches books. In short, libraries are constructed by architects, not librarians.

Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them--they're on the shore and we're on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer.

Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.

I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but that death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, but the death will never disappear from view. Your friends may say, Time heals all wounds. No, it doesn't, but eventually you'll feel better. You'll be yourself again.

She had a rear end as big as an open dictionary and a bad attitude.

We have, all of us, invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.

I'm so sorry," he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I'm so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.

Lighter things will happen to you, birds will steal your husband's sandwich on the beach, and your child will still be dead, and your husband's shock will still be funny.

They--the books I mean, not the ladies of Technical Services, though maybe those ladies too--might have dreamed of a different life in a private home, beloved and displayed and well dressed and only occasionally, dreamily read, but they belonged to the city now and had to work for the common good.

I told him that I apologised, that I understood, but really: I am not a museum, not yet, I'm a love letter, a love letter.

Aunt Helen Beck had many intentions about her death. She was about being dead the way some people are about being British - she wasn't, and it seemed she would never be, but it was clearly something she aspired to, since all the people she respected were.

History remembers the velvet hearted.

My mother's favorite cats were male and nervous and needed her. "Come to Mommy," my mother would say to one of them. "Yes, I love you, too." "You are not that cat's mother," I said, sitting on the sofa during a visit. "Don't listen to her," said my mother.

If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don't get married, then what you saved isn't worth anything. It's like Confederate money. You're bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it." Caroline to Peggy

Don't run away from your troubles, because they'll sure as hell run faster.

Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.

I had loved Portland. It was a clean city, with weather so delicate that at night you had to look at the streetlights to tell whether it was raining or snowing. Everything was heavier near Boston: air, accents, women.

Everybody on this earth was born," he said. "It's the one thing we all have in common.