Quotes from Kate Walbert

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you? Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.

I don't know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That's just the way it is.

Eleanor had bargained for their wedding present, the dragon-spouted teapot worth thousands and the cups to match, gold-leafed, scaly.

In the background, classical music plays from a paint-splattered radio, the New York station with the ancient announcer more frequently heard in doctors' waiting rooms and other places where signs prohibit the use of cell phones – the last bastions of Beethoven or Chopin or, on racier days, Shostakovich.

In another landscape, a line of spruce in the distance would appear an inkblot, a punctuation to the endless grey sentence of the morning.

Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one

So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into the past, never speeding into the future.

Someone once told me a memory is just another draft of a story.

they were all so clearly portraits of the kind of girl who should be mourned, who should be missed given her do-goodness, her smile, her kindness toward others, and not portraits of any actual girl I knew.

Thank you for listening, he wrote. Dear Beautiful, he wrote. I know I can trust you, he wrote. I think of you all day, he wrote. I wonder how you taste, he wrote. Secret-keeper, he wrote.

From here there is never not a day without Master's shadow across my life—a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going, the place I once imagined I would be.

No, I say. In no moral universe would this not be a crime, I say. I was a child, I tell him. Shame on you, I say. Shame on you, I say. Shame on you. And he laughs and reaches out for me. "You are cute as pie when you're angry," he says. "Come here," he says. "How old are you again?" he says. "Close your eyes," he says.

Iago says, I am not what I am, and for this he is called deceitful, a villain. Odd, isn't it? I have always found him to be the most truthful of Shakespeare's creations. We are none of us who we are.

How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender – coupled with the perversions of age and the randomness of everything?

Beauty! Sid Morris said, addressing the dirty windows that looked out to the alley where, on certain Thursdays, the smell up from the Chinese restaurant across the street reached a point you could almost taste. Beauty! he said.

Do you think we are truly ever old?" she says. "I mean, inside ourselves, old? Ready to be old?

The point is," Sid Morris says. "This. Now. Paint on your brush, wind at your back, my crappy studio. This is the only certainty. Here: your sensations; your body existing for its moment in time. Everything else is crap.