John Burnham Schwartz > Quotes

“There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Northwest Corner

“Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner

“A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Northwest Corner

“Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner

“There was before her and now there is after her, and that is the difference in my life.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Claire Marvel: A Novel

“There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road

“Beyond the terrace, a light breeze stirred the reeds at the edge of the pond. Looking out at this intimate vista, one could see the reeds and a stone lantern and the brightest of the evening's stars floating on the gloaming mirror of the pond. Then the breeze came again to crack the water's surface, and the picture was flooded.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner

“I sat thinking. How it was she who'd mentioned love first. How she seemed to be waiting, the door still between us, for me to act. And I imagined that if I reached for her I would find her where she lay waiting in the water, and my fingers would glide over her bare wet skin until every inch of her, every crook and hollow, would become mine. I would vouch for her with my life.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Claire Marvel: A Novel

“Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for unlived desire, a negative sanctuary. You wait and wait, but the receptionist is very stern and, somehow, the appointment book always full. To make matters worse, crowded into the adjoining cell like so many desperate immigrants, and separated from you by nothing more than the thin permeable wall of your own fear, are all the anticipated rejections of your life. You would think it might be noisy in there, but you'd be wrong. It is totally silent. There's a small Plexiglas window through which you can study these things, this silence, if you have the inclination and the nerve. And eventually, if you have been a diligent enough student and not wasted your time in dreaming, you come to understand that it is not the rejections that make this a prison, not the defeats, but rather your own grim expectation of defeat; not life but its bodily outline drawn in chalk, where the body should be but isn't, where it once was, this ingrained cowardly pessimism, this relentless betting against love and instinct. This is where the silence comes from.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Claire Marvel: A Novel

“She was Mattie Tucker now, mother of three and a good forty pounds heavier, casting that burning eye over them all, reaching way back for a southern pleasantry that was more like a Halloween apple with a razor blade in it: 'Well, don't y'all make just the perfect family of four?”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road

“Why? What had she ever done? What had any of them ever done? To give a child only to take him away. To make and then unmake, as if a family weren't built of lives but of things that could be broken, returned, thrown out--”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road

“I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other people's stories, finding the figure in the carpet, the order in things. God in the details and no place else.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road

“By almost every account he's a fine young man. I'm simply trying to figure out why I should care that he's three centimeters taller than he was in May.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner

“that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, Northwest Corner