Peter Orner > Quotes

“Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso.”
― Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love

“Yeah, I want to retreat from the world and ponder in solitude. At the same time I wouldn’t mind at least a couple of people pondering my whereabouts.”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“The lake is always east. East is always the lake. Anywhere else he's ever been he never knows where he is.”
― Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love

“But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.”
― Peter Orner

“Maybe the kids will always be stronger. It’s us—the impostors masquerading as protectors—who are unimaginably weak. For”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“Leo wondered what unknown sin they must have committed in some previous life to deserve this. The answer came the same way their feet later shocked to life in the warming hut after being so numb for hours- you think you'll never feel your toes again, and then all of a sudden life, damaged, stiffened, clammy, but life, dog-eat-dog life! We have not done a single thing to deserve this.”
― Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love

“Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?”
― Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love

“For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life.”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“That’s it. I’m asking you, I’m really asking you—how is it possible that we aren’t in a permanent state of mourning?”
― Peter Orner, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge: Stories

“And I thought, Holy fuck, we're not dead. Together. As in not dead yet. Think of all the years we will be. Our bodies turn to caramel. [Naked Man Hides]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Some persons are made more perfect by what befalls them, as is whatever befalls them can never make them less, can never bring them low, as it might others. --Gina Berriault, "The Tea Ceremony”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Something occurs, in the motion of the present, but it's already over. Because even then, even as she watched, she was already moving away from it, already thinking about how years from now she might tell someone about this.”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“A story: lurks. A story, a good story, is just out of reach, always. Wake up in an unfamiliar darkness, in a room you don't seem to recognize. Flip on the light. Nothing there. It's your room again. But didn't you feel a presence in the dark? The presence of someone you once knew? Someone you once loved?”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“And she'd apologize for what what she remembered and what she forgot. A lot depended on what they both forgot. [Montreal]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Tomorrow I'm going to Wong's, and I'm going to listen to the music of my own lack of thoughts." / "Go," Gus says. "Nobody's stopping you." / "You don't see the beauty?" Walt says. / "Beauty of what? History of what?" Alf says. / "Everything. Shoelaces, farts, love, death, cantaloupes--all I have to do is remember." [Walt Kaplan/13 Gus's Highland Spa]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“...To ensure that we don't merely exist in the dead present? ... That the oblivion of the now as opposed to the ecstasy of looking back--but wait, wait, if the present is the past, you fool, dissolving this very moment--then it is incumbent upon us now, now, to create the past--so obvious! so rudimentary!--it's the uncreated past that is dead [Walt Kaplan/August, Bedroom]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn’t a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can’t, I won’t, because to save her once isn’t to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn’t silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can’t hear you.”
― Peter Orner, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge: Stories

“It comes down to this. When we die, not only will our bodies be gone, but so will the people we remember. We live in the world, and we recall the world, and one day we won't do either anymore. The church bells will ring and the drunks will drink.”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“Los cuentos naufragan cuando se los lee una única vez. Debemos reencontrarnos con un cuento una y otra vez, en distintos momentos de la vida y en diferentes estados de ánimo.”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“Our history is not a continuous line; it's a circle we draw over and over on a blotter. Chicago, Fall River, Chicago. Thomas Carlyle, the man from Arkansas, my own daughter, Thomas Carlyle. Work, not work. The terrors of the sleeper and the helplessness of the awake. [Walt Kaplan/Rachel Plotkin]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“But hadn't she heard that for someone who's made up their mind, everything becomes so much lighter? It made sense, in a way. Like suddenly nothing costs you anything anymore?”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“You could stand there two hours; you could stand there five minutes. The Pacific didn't give a hoot about time. It would eat a year for breakfast. Is that why they'd always been so drawn to it? Is that why, still, they came and stood at the edge, day after day? Its blessed indifference? [Pacific]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person’s life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned I was not to be trusted.”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“That our own standing as part of an integrated universe not only allows us but, by singular divine fiat, compels--induces--us to connect, to merge, to unify--”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“I only want to repeat what you already know. There is no limit to how far a person can fall in America.”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Hay padres autoritarios por docenas, en los libros y en la vida. El nuestro era un volcán rojo como un tomate en un traje de tres piezas… El tiempo es un círculo. Masticamos, tragamos y tratamos de no llamar la atención. La casa no está, la demolieron, y sin embargo seguimos intentando pasar la cena sin sobresaltos.”
― Peter Orner, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin

“The nature of reaching, the nature of whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both the reaching of hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good. [Walt Kaplan/23 Kaplan's Furniture]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“For me, all stories are fiction. The only question is: Does it rattle the soul or not?”
― Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“That spring when I had a great deal of potential and no money at all, I took a job as a janitor.”
― Peter Orner, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin