Quotes from Dana Spiotta

In your whole life, only in young childhood, and only if you were very fortunate, could you get a measure of innocence—a time free of knowing what will come, of what must come. Those moments, that simple engagement of only what was wonderful about being alive, that love, really, would be at the center of you forever; deep inside, you would have this tender core that believed everything would be okay.

And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.

What you don't get from having a mother versus being a mother is how consuming it was, how profoundly one-sided. The child's job was to need her mother less and less, a progression toward independence. But the mother's job was to always help, always be there when needed, and never, ever stop worrying.

she knew part of what made Facebook—and the internet, really—addicting was simultaneously indulging your own obsessions while mocking (deriding, denouncing even) the obsessions of others from the safety of your screen.

Why was Will able to buy this cherished object, this marker of some long-past connection between two people, in an antiques store? At some point there had to be an ending, a death or a breakup, and it got tossed in a box to be given away or sold.

Yet somehow living as a 1912 woman or as an 1860 woman involved being on Facebook a lot.

The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history.

An arm moving, a person kneeling to shoot in a uniform. It wasn't, of course, re-creating that day in 1970. The "real" feeling came from using film that reminded us of that day. So her reenactments used the materials—the look—of the collective memory.

She was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old-fashioned word, plain.

I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time.

Meadow found it riveting: what machines of comforting delusions we humans are. Our language, our words, our ever treading minds and interior thoughts, all of these to make an architecture of lies that even we almost believe. No wonder the world is such a mean place, each of us judging one another without seeing our own terrible cruelties.

She herself had done little all day; instead she reported from the edge of an unlived life.