Quotes from Marie Howe

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk down a sidewalk without looking back.

I called her name into the fold between night and day.

If I stopped dyeing my hair everyone would know that my golden hair is actually gray, and my long American youth would be over—and then what?

Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings, someone shaking out a rug from an open window might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away and thought little or nothing of it.

One day it happens: what you have feared all your life, the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself.

and he: (and this was almost unbearable) he saw me see him, and I saw him see me. He said something like, You're going to be ok now, or, It's been difficult hasn't it, but what he said mattered only a little. We met — in our mutual gaze — in between a third place I'd not yet been.

Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

This is what the living do.

the bridge appears when you walk across it—that