Quotes from Peter Orner

You could stand there two hours; you could stand there five minutes. The Pacific didn't give a hoot about time. It would eat a year for breakfast. Is that why they'd always been so drawn to it? Is that why, still, they came and stood at the edge, day after day? Its blessed indifference? [Pacific]

Maybe the kids will always be stronger. It's us—the impostors masquerading as protectors—who are unimaginably weak. For

if you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night, your head would explode clean off your neck. [Ineffectual Tribute to Len]

A story: lurks. A story, a good story, is just out of reach, always. Wake up in an unfamiliar darkness, in a room you don't seem to recognize. Flip on the light. Nothing there. It's your room again. But didn't you feel a presence in the dark? The presence of someone you once knew? Someone you once loved?

Some persons are made more perfect by what befalls them, as is whatever befalls them can never make them less, can never bring them low, as it might others. --Gina Berriault, The Tea Ceremony

That our own standing as part of an integrated universe not only allows us but, by singular divine fiat, compels--induces--us to connect, to merge, to unify--

And she'd apologize for what what she remembered and what she forgot. A lot depended on what they both forgot. [Montreal]

That spring when I had a great deal of potential and no money at all, I took a job as a janitor.

To ensure that we don't merely exist in the dead present? ... That the oblivion of the now as opposed to the ecstasy of looking back--but wait, wait, if the present is the past, you fool, dissolving this very moment--then it is incumbent upon us now, now, to create the past--so obvious! so rudimentary!--it's the uncreated past that is dead [Walt Kaplan/August, Bedroom]

For me, all stories are fiction. The only question is: Does it rattle the soul or not?

But hadn't she heard that for someone who's made up their mind, everything becomes so much lighter? It made sense, in a way. Like suddenly nothing costs you anything anymore?