Top 35 Rebecca Makkai Quotes
#1. You realize something once, when you are nine, and then you realize it again when you are ten, and you realize when you are eleven, twelve, but every year you see that what you thought you understood a year ago, no, wait it is ten times worse. And your heart fills up with lead.
Rebecca Makkai
#2. Very few writers thank their mothers for keen editorial insight; I'm happy to be the exception.
Rebecca Makkai
#3. I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be one huge blur. There's a lot that gets neglected: exercise, dishes, laundry, my poor garden. I try to prioritize the important but non-urgent things over the unimportant but urgent things.
Rebecca Makkai
#4. Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.
Rebecca Makkai
#5. With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.
Rebecca Makkai
#6. I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.
Rebecca Makkai
#7. She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously.
Rebecca Makkai
#8. Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust.
Rebecca Makkai
#9. We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.
Rebecca Makkai
#10. If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.
Rebecca Makkai
#11. And for what portion of human history had people even had desk jobs?
Rebecca Makkai
#12. We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by?" ~ "The Museum of the Dearly Departed
Rebecca Makkai
#13. Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.
Rebecca Makkai
#14. And second, everyone is so weird, but they're all completely accepted. It's like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy's made of tin, and you're a talking chicken, but what the hell, let's do a road trip.
Rebecca Makkai
#15. In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.
Rebecca Makkai
#16. I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.
Rebecca Makkai
#17. By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.
Rebecca Makkai
#18. History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ "The Briefcase
Rebecca Makkai
#20. When you talk to an author - to any artist, really - you learn something about how they do what they do. I've never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form.
Rebecca Makkai
#21. Because I couldn't think of anything nonprofane to say at that moment, I said nothing.
Rebecca Makkai
#22. We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.
Rebecca Makkai
#23. I could put a book in his hands, but I couldn't take him by the ankles and dip him headfirst in another world. And for some reason, I knew even then that he needed it.
Rebecca Makkai
#24. The times I've tried not to be funny, it's never worked, and the times I'm trying not to be dark and just be funny, that never works, either. As varied as my subject matter is, I think the worldview is pretty consistent: seeing darkness and seeing humor.
Rebecca Makkai
#25. These were wise, modern children, and they knew: a mother could be a witch, a child could be a criminal. A librarian could be a thief.
Rebecca Makkai
#26. I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn't have to reach too far back for the titles and authors that populate the early chapters 'of The Borrower.'
Rebecca Makkai
#27. Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
Rebecca Makkai
#28. The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story
Rebecca Makkai
#29. In a library in Missouri that was covered with vines
Lived thousands of books in a hundred straight lines
A boy came in at half past nine
Every Saturday, rain or shine
His book selections were clan-des-tine.
Rebecca Makkai
#30. There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.
Rebecca Makkai
#31. The whole damn century would've made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.
Rebecca Makkai
#32. [E]scaping is its own special brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls who didn't save themselves. ~ "The Worst You Ever Feel
Rebecca Makkai
#33. I no longer believe I can save people. I've tried, and I've failed, and while I'm sure there are people out there in the world with that particular gift, I'm not one of them ... But books, on the other hand: I do still believe that books can save you.
Rebecca Makkai
#34. Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.
Rebecca Makkai
#35. All I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.
Rebecca Makkai
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