“Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words in the air. ‘Life is.’ Wait. ‘But a.’ Now, wait. ‘Dream.'”
– The Moons of Jupiter – Chaddeleys and Flemings – Alice Munro
“You are always saying hello to them while preparing them to say goodbye to you. you are always dreading the separations, while cheering them on, to get bigger, smarter, to crawl, babble, walk, speak, to have birthdays that you hope you’ll live to see, that you pray they’ll live to see. Jeanne will now know what it’s like to live that way, to have a part of yourself walking around unattached to you, and to love that part so much that you sometimes feel as though you were losing your mind.”
– Everything Inside – Sunrise, Sunset – Edwidge Danticat
“Sorry means: that happened to you. That happened to you and it may or may not have been inevitable, but it happened and there are some things that happen that we can only look at and say, sorry. Circular. Sorry for your loss means I am sorry that there is loss, or to put it another way, there is loss.”
– Sorry Please Thank You: Stories – Charles Yu
“Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually remind him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well…there is no happiness and there should be none, and if life has a meaning and a purpose, that meaning and purpose is not our happiness but something greater and more rational. Do good!”
– Gooseberries – Anton Chekhov
Quotes from the Weekly Bulletin (sign up here)
“I’m writing letters to each one of you lucky winners who has a hook in my heart. Every time your heart beats I can feel a little jerk, just a little something. Whether you like it or not, that’s love.”
– The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson
“So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.”
– Dance of the Happy Shades – Walker Brothers Cowboy – Alice Munro
“The good lord bird don’t run in a flock. He flies alone. You know why? He’s searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that’s taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till that thing gets tired and falls down. And the dirt from it raises the other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes ‘em strong. Gives ‘em life. And the circle goes ‘round.”
– The Good Lord Bird – James McBride
“…They were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—”
– The Tenth of December – George Saunders
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