Quotes from Elizabeth McCracken

I like to hold the chunk of remaining book as I read; I like to feel it diminish.

When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity--you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. It was like luck. Luck once meant anything could happen. Now it meant he was doomed. But maybe it didn't need to.

Nothing wrong with you a good roller coaster wouldn't fix.

I loved him because I wanted to save him, and because I could not. I loved him because I wanted to be enough for him, and I was not. I loved him because I discovered that day, after years of practice, I had a talent for it.

The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They're listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.

She was the glow in a darkened theater above a door: EXIT

This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use.

You could think a grackle was somebody you'd lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.

You," she might have said to a particular grackle. "Georgia. Is it?

But a library is a gorgeous language that you will never speak fluently. You will try every day of your life. Order is a certain clumsy grammar, a mnemonic device. Order just means: try to use verbs. Consider the tense. The poetry will follow.

Everyone knows that it's noble to go to museums unaccompanied. Look at us solitary exhibition gawkers: We pause to read the captions, we wander the rooms at a thoughtful speed, we think things, and therefore we're allowed to drink early and often.

Nearby was a box of thick seventy-eights, grackle black and grackle brilliant. Thea thought the cliff might come down. But the woman was goat-footed; she got to the top and came back down and handed over the doll.

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.

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie in the arms of anyone who asked.

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn't; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle. Maybe they don't want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?

Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren't.

My parents disapproved of very little that I did. They didn't approve, either: Whatever opinions they had about what I did, they kept to themselves. They believed my life was my own business. This, I understand now, is a great gift, though a gift that comes without kvelling.

Grief, as I understood it - grief and I were acquainted - is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out.

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant's head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck.

Remember that a woman who has given birth to a dead child has given birth and is recovering physically, too. Don't be afraid of grieving parents.

Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.

I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country.

There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'