Quotes from Lydia Davis

That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you've been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we've explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we're having now that a few months have gone by--- but now it's time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

He came out from somewhere at night and crept around the kitchen with a sharp razor in his white, fine-boned hand, shaving off slivers of meat, of nuts, of bread, until his plate, paper-thin, felt heavy to him.

Beyond the hand holding this book that I'm reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.

Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act.

Here is a woman I know coming up to me. She is very excited, but she is not an interesting woman. What excites her will not be interesting, it will simply not be interesting.

Here is a very handsome English traffic engineer. The fact that he is so handsome, and so animated, and has such a fine English accent makes it appear, each time he begins to speak, that he is about to say something interesting, but he is never interesting, and he is saying something, yet again, about traffic patterns.

Our lives are in chronological order, if no other kind of order.

I have never associated myself with such an unexpected part of the body as the thyroid, so it feels as though my body is suddenly strange to me, or I am strange to myself.

Was I, in fact, afraid of the present age, and was I even glad, rather than merely surprised, that the glaciers might return?

One gains courage from the one in front of her and moves forward a few steps, passing her by just a little. Now the one farthest back gains courage from the one in front and moves forward until she, in turn, is the leader. And so in this way, taking courage from one another, they advance, as a group, towards the strange thing in front of them.

It is the lowered head that makes her seem less noble than, say, a horse, or a deer surprised in the woods. More exactly, it is her lowered head and neck. As she stands still, the top of her head is level with her back, or even a little lower, and so she seems to be hanging her head in discouragement, embarrassment, or shame. There is at least a suggestion of humility and dullness about her. But all these suggestions are false.

Eleven years—that is long. Long enough so that the roots of love, if the tree is robust, plunge so deep that they will subsist always, even dried up.

She begins to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

He says to us: They don't really do anything. Then he adds: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.

If they finally move, is it because they are warm enough, or is it that they are stiff, or bored?

The snow on their faces is so white that how the white patches on their faces, which once looked so white against their black, are a shade of yellow.

Just as it is hard for us, in our garden, to stop weeding, because there is always another weed there in front of us, it may be hard for her to stop grazing, because there are always a few more shoots of fresh grass just ahead of her.

He objected to the barbarity of the Old Testament and questioned the authenticity of the New Testament. He said that "if Christ had meant to establish a new religion, he would have written it down himself.

They do sometimes protest...At these times, she sounds authoritative. But she has no authority.

She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.

Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.

The old vacuum cleaner keeps dying on her over and over until at last the cleaning woman scares it by yelling: "Motherfucker!

The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal--we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.

Suddenly there it is, my own spirit: an old white dog with bowed legs and swaying head staring around the corner of the porch with one mad, cataract-filled eye.