Quotes from Elizabeth Graver

To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward veerse. Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you.

Now it's dusk, bats swooping and rising along the lawn, against the sea. Would that she could join them-flap wings, fly blind, beat back her foul mood.

Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.

Table salt hardens here. Books mildew. Diaries flip open. Private Property: Please Turn Around.

how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?

From her mother, Janie learned to play charades and murder in the dark, to run three-legged races, to spot hermit thrushes, towhees (Mrs. P. said the towhee's call was Drink your tea!; Bea said it was Brush your teeth!), and tell prairie warblers from the maryland yellowthroat and the great horned from the barred owl by their calls.

Helen was happy for them, and disdainful, and jealous of them for getting more of each other while she got less of them, and, mostly, astonished-that life could actually move forward like this into adulthood.

Two whole lives, a person might have. Three or four or five. If only. Never before had she felt this fanning out of possibilities; one life had seemed plenty, difficult sometimes, other times fine. Either way, her lot.

I love him too and believe he loves me, but does he like me, which is not the same as love?

Being a father would be different, harder, but might he not (if generations have told themselves the lie, then scan he) do it just a little better than his parents, pass on his best self, discard the rest, or at the very least, do his best by doing his best?

The skull is not broken, or only a little, here. He doesn't actually know it's a female, but he wants it to be. Female and a mother, old, died of natural causes. And somewhere in the sea, her young, no longer young. Their young.

To see your mother as a baby, that is what it's like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne.

THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.

Love the sojourner for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Again the thunder clapped. Still Eva stood in the field. Maybe, she thought, a girl struck by lightning would split down the middle and become two girls, and then she'd have a friend. She held out her watch with its metal band, to call the lightning down.