Quotes from Monica Wood

When he sauntered into the house and took a brownie without asking, she realized how long it had been since someone paid her the compliment of presumption.

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.

The shape of our family has been upended and rearranged, its roof flattened, its gateposts ripped from the earth by God's own brutal hand, and only the animals know enough to make a run for it.

A single task won't crush your spirit. Give yourself a break

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

That face could halt an anvil in mid-drop

Where to, Ona?" Belle asked, slowing down. 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.

Physician's assistant.

People don't write their own endings'" he said. "Well, I'm planning on writing mine.

I was no good at all at the jitterbug, as I have just now demonstrated, but then this other song came on, a song from a movie. . . . "Tammy." About a girl falling in love. I haven't thought of that song for years. Debbie Reynolds sang it, in a voice that would put you in mind of maple syrup.

a thousand songs that made people bite their lips and bob their heads, recalling a place they once lived, a person they once loved, a version of themselves they'd forgotten.

The packet of fading photos gives it away if you know how to look: always a rundown porch landing and stair rails behind, always a child squinting into strong sunlight and a grim-faced adult skulking in shadow. What must it have been like to grow up in that silence?

Mrs. Japan and Mrs. Romania had unpronounceable names, the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants.

her newly coiffed hair now jutting from her head like feathers on a badly plucked chicken.

I read with a kind of curious terror, learning that words can pin their readers to place, confer permanence on the ethereal, make the unimaginable true.

You'd have thought Louise was the snow itself, falling all around me, muffling the cold and the wind even as she was the source of it.

People don't write their own endings," he said.

I have always loved books for their reassuring heft, for their promise of new words, for their air of mystery, for their characters who lived in them, for the sublime pleasure of disappearing. But not until now, at the threshold of this perilous summer, have I ever turned to storybooks for instruction.

This night I'm thinking of, it had one of those skies where the stars looked poured from a barrel.

and as she watched the father smile, she caught another bewitching way in which the son might have come to resemble him.

A young receptionist greeted him with a buoyancy born of an excellent benefits package.

He had observed so many men just like himself over the years, men in retirement walking wee, quivery dogs over the streets of their neighborhood, a wrinkled plastic bag in their free hand;

These bruised people shored me up, and I wanted them near me, not because misery loved company but because the business of human striving felt common to us all. In this was the presence of God.

the air had that midwinter crackle. You know that feeling, like the air might break? .