Top 99 Elizabeth McCracken Quotes
#1. Aunt Helen Beck had many intentions about her death. She was about being dead the way some people are about being British - she wasn't, and it seemed she would never be, but it was clearly something she aspired to, since all the people she respected were.
Elizabeth McCracken
#2. Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human.
Elizabeth McCracken
#3. But a library is a gorgeous language that you will never speak fluently.
Elizabeth McCracken
#4. Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.
Elizabeth McCracken
#5. The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers.
Elizabeth McCracken
#6. Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.
Elizabeth McCracken
#7. Other people's happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you're left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn't ever noticed.
Elizabeth McCracken
#8. It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.
Elizabeth McCracken
#9. The finger-biter's feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree - they may have started in something real, but she'd tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative.
Elizabeth McCracken
#10. I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable.
Elizabeth McCracken
#11. I own an e-reader, but I use it almost exclusively to read things that aren't books - student theses, unbound galleys.
Elizabeth McCracken
#13. All she really wanted was to go to her apartment, to her bedroom, to the back of her walk-in closet, to sit among the shoes.
Elizabeth McCracken
#14. I had loved Portland. It was a clean city, with weather so delicate that at night you had to look at the streetlights to tell whether it was raining or snowing. Everything was heavier near Boston: air, accents, women.
Elizabeth McCracken
#15. I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too.
Elizabeth McCracken
#16. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#17. When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel.
Elizabeth McCracken
#18. I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed.
Elizabeth McCracken
#19. When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.
Elizabeth McCracken
#21. He was talking to strangers, hoping they would absolve him. They are the only ones who ever can.
Elizabeth McCracken
#22. I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book.
Elizabeth McCracken
#23. Librarian like Stewardess, Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality.
Elizabeth McCracken
#24. There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.
Elizabeth McCracken
#25. And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.
Elizabeth McCracken
#26. In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.
Elizabeth McCracken
#29. For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.
Elizabeth McCracken
#30. I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.
Elizabeth McCracken
#31. There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don't know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.
Elizabeth McCracken
#32. She was a clock, I could tell by the ticking in her wrist. (I'd secretly slipped my thumb down, to feel her pulse as we danced. It was perfectly steady and wreaking havoc with mine.) I could keep time by you, I thought.
Elizabeth McCracken
#33. I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country.
Elizabeth McCracken
#34. This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use.
Elizabeth McCracken
#35. You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people.
Elizabeth McCracken
#36. In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault.
Elizabeth McCracken
#37. Lighter things will happen to you, birds will steal your husband's sandwich on the beach, and your child will still be dead, and your husband's shock will still be funny.
Elizabeth McCracken
#38. My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.
Elizabeth McCracken
#39. Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.
Elizabeth McCracken
#40. I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single.
Elizabeth McCracken
#41. Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.
Elizabeth McCracken
#42. The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They're listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.
Elizabeth McCracken
#43. If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don't get married, then what you saved isn't worth anything. It's like Confederate money. You're bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it.
Caroline to Peggy
Elizabeth McCracken
#44. My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war.
Elizabeth McCracken
#45. I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.
Elizabeth McCracken
#46. I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line.
Elizabeth McCracken
#48. For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.
Elizabeth McCracken
#49. But you cannot fly away from people who have flown away from you; you cannot fly into your own arms.
Elizabeth McCracken
#50. You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'
Elizabeth McCracken
#51. But you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.
Elizabeth McCracken
#52. I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on, but death goes on too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, , but the death will never disappear from view.
Elizabeth McCracken
#53. Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.
Elizabeth McCracken
#54. You can't out-travel sadness. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings
Elizabeth McCracken
#55. Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.
Elizabeth McCracken
#56. In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.
Elizabeth McCracken
#57. When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.
Elizabeth McCracken
#59. Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.
Elizabeth McCracken
#60. I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.
Elizabeth McCracken
#62. I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic.
Elizabeth McCracken
#63. I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over.
Elizabeth McCracken
#64. I come from food the way some people come from money. Food was the medium I grew up in, what we talked about, what shaped our days.
Elizabeth McCracken
#65. Patty Flood and her good mood were starting to get on my nerves. Her mood was so good it was almost a physical thing, a monkey on a leash that she let leap all over the furniture, delighting only its owner.
Elizabeth McCracken
#66. Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.
Elizabeth McCracken
#67. An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant's head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck.
Elizabeth McCracken
#69. Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.
Elizabeth McCracken
#70. When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
Elizabeth McCracken
#71. I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory.
Elizabeth McCracken
#72. Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.
Elizabeth McCracken
#73. A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you.
Elizabeth McCracken
#74. Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable.
Elizabeth McCracken
#75. Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.
Elizabeth McCracken
#76. Don't run away from your troubles, because they'll sure as hell run faster.
Elizabeth McCracken
#77. It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.
Elizabeth McCracken
#78. There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'
Elizabeth McCracken
#79. I'm a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office.
Elizabeth McCracken
#80. Remember that a woman who has given birth to a dead child has given birth and is recovering physically, too. Don't be afraid of grieving parents.
Elizabeth McCracken
#81. New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom.
Elizabeth McCracken
#82. There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.
Elizabeth McCracken
#83. The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar.
Elizabeth McCracken
#86. There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
Elizabeth McCracken
#87. In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior.
Elizabeth McCracken
#88. When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.
Elizabeth McCracken
#89. Fearlessness is an accounting trick. You feel the fear; you just defer it. I could stand on the cliff immobile, feeling terrified, or I could leap and feel the terror while falling.
Elizabeth McCracken
#90. This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy.
Elizabeth McCracken
#91. Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.
Elizabeth McCracken
#92. Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments.
Elizabeth McCracken
#93. In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Elizabeth McCracken
#94. Though my love for you is infinitesimal, your eyes are as dewey as any old decimal.
Elizabeth McCracken
#95. I didn't know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.
Elizabeth McCracken
#96. Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.
Elizabeth McCracken
#97. I told him that I apologised, that I understood, but really: I am not a museum, not yet, I'm a love letter, a love letter.
Elizabeth McCracken
#98. Said. "I'm just not ready yet." It would take something other than my daily nagging. So one night, a night I knew would be
Elizabeth McCracken
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