Quotes from Elizabeth McCracken

She'd worn her most ostentatious clothes because she knew that the best camouflage was a kind of flagrancy: you didn't have to worry how people took you so much if the first thing they noticed was that you were rich.

McCracken's latest novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir, though she rejects the term "autofiction" as sounding "like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.

Never give up your metaphoric bad habits, the way your obsessions make themselves visible in your words. Tell yourself that one day a scholar will write a paper on them, an x-ray of your psyche, with all of your quirks visible like breaks in bones, both healed and fresh.

She was a clock, I could tell by the ticking in her wrist. (I'd secretly slipped my thumb down, to feel her pulse as we danced. It was perfectly steady and wreaking havoc with mine.) I could keep time by you, I thought.

The finger-biter's feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree—they may have started in something real, but she'd tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative.

You could believe in God, looking at James. He looked at himself, and decided not to.

Fearlessness is an accounting trick. You feel the fear; you just defer it. I could stand on the cliff immobile, feeling terrified, or I could leap and feel the terror while falling.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up.

Movie kisses looked like they'd hurt. She couldn't get enough of them. They made her feel alive - not in any expansive way, but assessed, her pulse taken, a rubber mallet to the knee that made her kick.

I'm a princess and sometimes I'm a fairy, and I'm a mermaid too.' I thought she was marvellous. She knew her own worth, she insisted on it. She knew that no matter how miserable the circumstances in which life placed her, she was better than that. She knew that a part of her was special and remarkable, and she was able to articulate that in her own way.

said. "I'm just not ready yet." It would take something other than my daily nagging. So one night, a night I knew would be

Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable.

She had forgotten how many minutes of motherhood were devoted to this question, even before Edith's accident. Alive now? And now? The deeper Edith's sleep the shallower her life, it seemed. The extraordinary stillness of a sleeping baby! Look for a breath at the stomach, flush at the cheeks. Then Luetta would leave the room, come back. She lost hours to the question. Alive now, now, now?

Love Poem for a Librarian Although her love for me is infinitesimal, Her eyes are as Dewey as any old decimal.

Sometimes in Texas as I walked, I would suddenly feel the presence of all the hidden guns around me, as though I were an x-ray machine. Here in London, I knew that not a single civilian—or police officer, for that matter—was armed.

For instance, it is a scientific fact that she shares his genes. We live in his house, among his possessions. And in every way his the one who brought her to me, which is one of reasons I love her-though much to my misanthropic amazement, not the only reason. He was my one, true husband and love, and he would have loved her best....

I'd performed numerous calculations on the abacus of my soul concerning the price of the room and the loveliness of the slipper tub.

What a thing, to marry into a family! What could be more perilous? And yet people did it all the time. They married and had children, every child a portmanteau, a mythical beast, a montage.

Hazel was old, but with children still little: she had an exhausted air of experience, someone who thought a lot of things but actually knew very few.

Louetta had recently decided she would be a wonder instead of a beauty. She had seen beauties go mad in middle age as their beauty turned less live and more monumental. Beauty still, but mostly to mark the space where greater beauty once had been. But wondrous was wondrous, even when you outgrew it.

Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.

My parents were a sight gag. Opposites otherwise, too. One shy but given to monologues, one outgoing and inclined to listen. One with a temper; one affable, sometimes enragingly so. Opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe.

I sponged off knickknacks, including the owls that my mother collected, still a manageable quantity. Soon enough they would become an infestation caused by the good intentions and generosity of the many people who adored her.

Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I'm a bird, but I could fuck you up.