Shipstead Quotes

#1. Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.

Maria Semple

#2. As a former ballerina, I can't put down Maggie Shipstead's new book, Astonish Me.

Caitlin Moran

#3. Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro

#4. People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other.

Maggie Shipstead

#5. The way an old dog finds his way back over miles and miles to his home when somebody trues to shove him off on a farm someplace, that is how I find my way back to the library. It's my place, even more than my place is.

Chris Lynch

#6. When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate's urge to cling, to close one's arms around a warm, soft object.

Maggie Shipstead

#7. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation.

Maggie Shipstead

#8. This was truly advanced WASP: how to comfort a wronged wife and mother without acknowledging any misdeeds done or embarrassment caused by loved ones.

Maggie Shipstead

#9. How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.

Maggie Shipstead

#10. She seems distracted, the way Joan feels when Harry is away on a school trip and part of her tries to follow him clairvoyantly through his day, probing the ether for any sign of distress.

Maggie Shipstead

#11. I believe in red meat. I've often said: red meat and gin.

Julia Child

#12. This is the worst idea in the history of ideas, yet I can't stop myself from nodding.

Denise Grover Swank

#13. If you fill your mind with wonderful thoughts, there can be no room left for doubt.

Silvia Hartmann

#14. There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#15. She didn't want to be one of those girls who said the exact opposite of what she meant, but still - it would have been nice to see Easy try.

Cecily Von Ziegesar

#16. Her throat is tight with fear. She is afraid of how this man, this stranger, has already changed the sensation of being alive. She is afraid he will slip away.

Maggie Shipstead

#17. A voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere.

Maggie Shipstead

#18. Female friendship was one-tenth prevention and nine-tenths cleanup.

Maggie Shipstead

#19. Though she would never say so, Sandy holds the opinion that mothers who keep their figures have sacrificed less than mothers who have widened and softened.

Maggie Shipstead

#20. He finds low-level jealousy to be enlivening, pleasantly astringent.

Maggie Shipstead

#21. No number of compliments will convince her of anything, and one of Jacob's projects in their marriage is to wean her off perfectionism.

Maggie Shipstead

#22. The unpainted walls of the long rectangular room were soaked with the smell of greasy chicken and warm, headless beer. The brown and pink faces floated above the trails of used cigarette smoke like bodiless carnival balloons.

Gloria Naylor

#23. What do I do?' she had asked Harry. 'What do I do now? Everything is ruined. You've ruined everything.' 'That you think that," he'd said, "is exactly the problem.

Maggie Shipstead

#24. Now is a time for change, a time to become the greatest version of yourself. And a time to to make your grandest vision of the world .

Ilchi Lee

#25. Ordinarily, her love affairs are entered into skittishly, sometimes reluctantly. She doesn't dive into bed but flutters in like a wayward moth.

Maggie Shipstead

#26. If the right man does not come along, there are many fates far worse. One is to have the wrong man come along.

Letitia Baldrige

#27. English dragoons

Diana Gabaldon

#28. All he asked of her was basic civility and an ounce of propriety, but she was like one of her sea creatures, goaded by the slightest disturbance into puffing up and flashing warning colors.

Shipstead, Maggie

#29. He let go, releasing her into a life of her own making.

Maggie Shipstead