Quotes from Monica Wood

I'm forty-two, " he said. "That's eighty-four in musician years.

You know, one meets so many people, the years pass and pass, but there are certain times, certain people— . . . They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan. . . .

Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning.

Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn't convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn't you, you little dickens?

His cheeks were all pinked up. Travel agreed with him, and she might have known: people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road.

There is no such thing as wasted writing.

each chime pecking a pinhole in the sheeted dark until the last layers shred completely and the light pours in and in.

the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants.

imagining her name in a record book. All those demure round letters in the first name, followed by the stalky surprise of the surname. Ona Vitkus.

But even talented people, sooner or later, cracked their heads against their own personal ceilings.

She died that evening and left me, in Louise fashion, sitting in ten kinds of dark.

It does take time. From the day I laid eyes on her, I wished Miss Louise Grady could just once look at me and see me. For years I kept that twinkling chance like a jewel in a box. That's what unrequited means.

Certain things, examined in the frozen light of retrospect, were simply unforgivable. He

They were on a first-name basis now, united in female solidarity after a twenty-minute conversation about cats. How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew.

He had not loved his son enough. This knowledge lived like a malignancy on his heart.

Convince is for thought; persuade is for action.

A busload of pilgrims today on journeys they never chose, having once believed themselves born for more than this.

Your sister strikes me as the type of driver who raises the rates for everybody else." "Good

because I know the difference between preaching and anesthesia.

Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don't they teach you anything in school?

alcoholic. To Quinn, for whom alcohol was a touchy simile, the truth was this: playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted. He

You know, one meets so many people, the years pass and pass, but there are certain times, certain people— . . . They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan.

Gradually, the darkness sculpted itself into air and object, the appointments of her room materializing as smoky shapes: a skyline of perfume bottles on her dresser...

It took years for me to know this, to see how loss can tighten your grip on the things still possible to hold.