Quotes from Myla Goldberg

School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.

She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.

As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I've discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.

Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube.

The day's dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind.

Creation takes place through words, a series of 'And God Saids' bringing each new stage of life into being. Language is God's divine power made manifest in the world.

life divides us into smaller and smaller pieces as we go, until each piece seems too small to do anything as worthwhile with it as we'd like

Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can't wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.

They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.

Equity, they came to realize, was not the same thing as equivalence, as evidenced by beside tables and snowflakes the world over.

Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted, but always and forever a goose.

Having already funneled its students to their respective classrooms, the school's front hall was empty, its glass showcase in the same neglected spot outside the front office. ... She looked at it briefly, her eyes sweeping over the faces of students whose adult trajectories would lead them either to gloss over these moments or to spend their lives pining for their return.

What struck Celia most about young children was the intensity of their passions, life too new to be modulated, perspective a possession not yet acquired.

While she eventually adjusts to the faded motivational posters featuring long-dead baby animals and the fifties-era reading books whose soporific effects have intensified with each decade of use she can't get it out of of her head that while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop other kids are flying to the moon.

O]nce you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone's face, you can't see her as a stranger.

don't want to make photographs. The way you described it with Capa's work is exactly right: I want to make windows.

Picture or no picture, people will keep killing each other using methods old and new—day after day, year after year, centuries of killing—until one way or another we're all dead, and all the guns and cameras of the world are just so much garbage lying in the dirt.

she felt about men the way she felt about pistachio nuts: she did not mind to have them around, but she did not go out of her way to find them, and she did not miss them when they were gone. Poor Vincent, I thought

but by then I'd spent several small lifetimes stuck in places with nothing better to do than try to parse a printed page as Lillian waited beside her web.