Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

Now? The future and I are just about even, our quarrel all but resolved. I welcome its coming, and I resolve to be attentive to the details of its arrival. I plan to meet it at the station in my best white dress, violet corsage in hand. Waving

I've learned that everything that thinks and feels," she said, "grows by subtraction. Detachment brings perspective. Wisdom comes from letting go. It's true for humans, too, but most of them seem to struggle with it.

Humans have no monopoly on grief. Dolphins carry their dead on their backs for days. Giraffes refuse to eat. Elephants cry. Whit carried the dead on his back for years. For life. I'll carry him on my flightless wings always.

The French children carried Baby Mine and me in our basket through the candlelit street to the church. While I was as mystified as ever by human religion and its tendency to answer simple questions with long, strange stories, that night I felt almost blessed.

A lot of these love notes seem to be from well-read and lovesick young men with literary aspirations. That type doesn't interest me in the least. They say they only have eyes for gazing at you and then end up gazing right back at their navels.

Honors ennoble those on whom they're bestowed, but they also ease the guilt of those whose commands made them necessary in the first place. A medal is a mirror, reflecting a glory that we force ourselves to believe in.

suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

No one quite believed that freelancing and being a mother qualified as actual work.

I couldn't really mean what my poems said. Could any sane person really oppose hope, romance, love, marriage, children, family: the most basic materials of human society? Was I—the cool and composed sweetheart of the smart set, the Girl Poet made flesh—secretly a monster for entertaining such suspicions?

Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon

On the ship back to New York late that July, I conceded. A bad idea, I knew, but I had come to see that the only way out of this suburban scheme of his was going to be through

No one survives the future, of course. Over the years I have rushed it, run from it, tried to shunt myself from its track. That these efforts did not succeed does not mean that I regret them.

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving.

It wasn't that happiness led to humor, but more that humor could lead, perhaps, to happiness—that an eye for the absurd could keep one active in one's despair, the opposite of depressed: static and passive.

Let no one say and say it to your shame That all was beauty here until you came.

Among the many unsurprising facts of life that, when taken in aggregate, ultimately spell out the doom of our species is this: People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.

Happiness and a love of fun are not coextensive, and their relationship may even be divergent. If one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.

She accused me of having a thwarted sense of superiority. Said that was the cause of all my present unhappiness. I had a high degree, she said, of linguistic mastery, as well as an intuitive understanding—nuts and bolts, nontheoretical—of psychology.

I couldn't argue. For years, that was how I did my work at R.H. Macy's: If I understood better than you did yourself why you thought or did or wanted something, then I could control you.

Solvitur Ambulando It is solved by walking

Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.

No one survives the future, of course. Over the years I have rushed it, run from it, tried to shunt myself from it's track. That these efforts did not succeed does not mean that I regret them.

We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed." "I remember that," I say. And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it—calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable—though it was Johnson who finally signed it.

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested