Quotes from Elizabeth McCracken

No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.

It was tempting to believe that if you made yourself small and light, beneath notice, you might be allowed to persist nearly anywhere. But meek women were tossed out and forgotten: that was something she had learned from Bertha Truitt herself. What women needed to do was take up space. Become unbudgeable.

As for me, I don't think writing is that hard, as long as you're comfortable with failure on every single level.

She loved being alive and in the world; being alive and in the world with her was like dancing with someone who really knew how to lead.

Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.

I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.

When I'd asked her about what she might like to happen after she died, she said, "I plan to die on trash night, so I can be put out in a Hefty bag." Also, she was a cheapskate: She disapproved of spending on the dead what could go to the living.

Dad hated those people so inconsiderate as to move in, move out, never making a noise, a scene, a mark, a complaint. A good story when you left was the only rent he insisted on.

All she really wanted was to go to her apartment, to her bedroom, to the back of her walk-in closet, to sit among the shoes.

Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable. As soon as I realized that, New York lost much of its charm for me.

But Jeptha was so amiably stupid everybody was the smartest man he ever met. It was a worldwide tie.

Unrequited love–plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing–turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn't want, couldn't use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness.

Librarians lose reason when it comes to the regulars, the good people, the readers.

They found a body in the Salford cemetery, but aboveground and alive.

For years I'd waited for someone to love me: that was the permission I needed to fall in love myself, as though I were a pin sunk deep in a purse, waiting for a magnet to prove me metal. When that did not happen, I'd thought of myself as unlovable . ...It was this I'd waited for all my life: a love that would make me useful, a love that would occupy all my time.

Our subject is love because our subject is bowling. Candlepin bowling. This is New England, and even the violence is cunning subtle. It still could kill you.

He was talking to strangers, hoping they would absolve him. They are the only ones who ever can.

There is something wrong with a person who loves ballpoint pens. I believe nothing so deeply as this.

Aunt Helen Beck did not believe in fate, but she did think that you made mistakes according to what you wanted in your heart, and she could not understand what it was she wanted this time, what she was trying to tell herself.

At that moment I felt so ruined by life that I couldn't imagine it ever getting worse, which just shows that my sense of humor was slightly more durable than my imagination.

What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed ...

My mother would hate me saying any of this. My father, too. It didn't matter how unprivate you were: If what you had to say about your life impinged on the privacy of others, then you shouldn't say it. My mother loved stories, though, particularly stories about herself, and she is, I think, the hero of this book, which she would like.

This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.

An old trailer flashed by, the round sort that had always looked to her like a thermos bottle, as if the people inside needed protection against rot.