Quotes from Beth Kephart

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.

How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.

The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.

Here's another change I've noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It's what you can't see that you hope you will see, what hasn't been that might be.

I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone. Your fiction is with you.

Fox-Trot By the stream the fox and she-fox stood Nose to nose beneath the stars Dancing the music of the woods. The deer rapped a beat with their hooves, The ravens sang from raven hearts As by the stream the fox and she-fox stood. The great owl called as a great owl would, The squirrels all shimmied in the dark, Dancing the music of the woods. Then from the north a fierce wind blew And broke the starry dance apart By the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.

I'd thought he was stars and then I'd thought he was a fox. I had thought I'd been alone, but I hadn't.

Beauty is the worst kind of lie.

I'd have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can't ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next...

You aren't happy," Estela says. "I can't be happy," I say. "Look at me, Kenzie." "I'm looking at you, Estela." "Do you know your own heart?" "I don't know anything." "Go," she says, "and think. And don't come back until you know.

Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I've learned. It's the heart that takes top honors.

Maybe all that matters is that they love each other, still, the way people who have known each other will always love each other.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

His client needs him, he says. Needs him? But isn't he needed at home?

When I was a boy, that was all I wanted—to grow a pair of wings and get up into the sky. I had a basement full of failed wing projects. Boards and capes and motors, even a pile of found feathers I once tried to glue together with a bottle of Elmer's; you should have seen your grandmother's face. But I never got any higher than the backyard fence I'd launch from. I never got inside a cloud. Your raven did.

Empathy smartens you

There is the who they thought they were and the who they wrote down, the something lost and the something gained, the discrepancy, now easily measured, between the voice they hear in their heads and the voice they find on their paper. "Our notebooks give us away," Joan Didion observes. And they do. They also provide, to memoir makers, a shelf and a foundation,

Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn't save you