Marie-Helene Bertino Quotes

#1. If you are anything other than humbled in the presence of love, you are not in the presence of love.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#2. If there were a race among all artists to the human heart, my money would be on music to win. It knows a shortcut.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#3. In the jaundiced light of a streetlamp, Sarina realizes why people have children: to see the face of the one they love at the ages they've missed ...

Marie-Helene Bertino

#4. She is officiating the marriage of two bottles of ketchup; overturning one and balancing it on the mouth of the other so it can empty its shit. The

Marie-Helene Bertino

#5. The mark of writing on me is so indelible, a tattoo would be redundant.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#6. You can't say you know a city unless you know three ways to everywhere.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#7. Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#8. Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#9. That's a drummer's love story. If you want a prettier one, you'll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you'd be cracked too

Marie-Helene Bertino

#10. The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#11. They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#12. That they can really haul is what most people don't know about wild turkeys.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#13. He had always listened to the music of a more sensitive man. She had let several relationship cruelties slide because of it.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#14. Good morning, the city says. Fuck you.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#15. A monkey could do my job better and with more hilarious results.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#16. Maybe God gets nervous in places like this, the way I feel in restaurants with linen napkins, because if he does exist, I don't feel him here.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#17. We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, man, either way we can't escape.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#18. Tonight, the Sisters of Saint Joseph and I are going to The Slaughterhouse Bar. I have four rolls of quarters and we are going to dance until there's blood in our slippers.

Marie-Helene Bertino

#19. That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself in boredom."
- Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses, title story

Marie-Helene Bertino