Quotes from Marianne Wiggins

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

I will never turn to God.

I don't remember being a child, and that's why I think I'm so child-like now in my unending curiosity and approach to life.

There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same--fleeting and unknowable--for every one of us. I lived.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

Wherever love comes from, whatever is its genesis, it isn't like a quantity of gold or diamonds, even water in the earth-a fixed quantity, Fos thought. You can't use up love, deplete it at its source. Love exists beyond fixed limits. Beyond what you can see or count.

You speak your mind, don't you...? A rare find in a woman.

Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.

There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same--fleeting and unknowable--for every one of us. I lived.

Art, their father had frequently told them, was exactly that: to make art is the realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel with and for a stranger.

It makes you wonder. How much you can know about a thing, a person. If you can know anything at all. Maybe no one's who we think they are. No one. Makes you doubt yourself, wonder if you even know yourself or if you've been lyin, too, along with everybody else.

I think what you can't see is always what you should be frightened of.

The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he'd said. The future will always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has run to sea.

You build a tower then you also build the chance it will fall. To think of life as a foolproof is a falacy of fools, he thought. Things happen, he believed, and there's nothing you can do to keep them from occuring.

Because way back before you were even born there was this girl you see. And I fell in love with her. It was something that I wanted-love-not because it was expected of me, but because I found it out my self-that happiness of wanting to be with that other person.

It's not how long it glows. It's not how long the light lasts. It's what it says while it's still visible.

The sight of Fos and Opal coming down the street together absolutely tickled him. The idea of two such strangely unremarkable yet lovable people could have found and met each other reaffirmed his waning faith in anything remotely optimistic about mankind and seemed to be a more convincing proof than all the gospel shit flown from the pulpits of Knox County that life could, in fact, distribute happy endings.

The past is carried to us on simple things—a written page, a spoon, a glove, a bowl of water: carried by the souls who touched them, those plain relics emanate, a language, freed of time, language without cadence—mute and eerie as the sound a granite planet makes giving birth to mountains, coursing its way through space.

To love is to accept that one might die another death before one dies one's own.

a novelist...we dream non-living characters and animate them with out words...