Quotes from work

Animal Dreams

“I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.”

“Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”

“But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”

“What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.”

“I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”

“She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.”

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.”

“Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.”

“He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless…. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.”

“At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.”

“Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.”

“The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.”

“We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”