Alison > Alison's Quotes

“The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.”
― Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“So my mother was one of the few people on the island who could hear foghorns at night and seagulls in the morning, and being responsible for so much listening made her a very quiet person.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“When she met my father she was still really good at being quiet. When she met him she realized how she had been collecting silence in a slender, delicate glass jar behind her ribcage. The bottle was not corked and so she always had to be very careful not to spill it.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“Until my grandfather finishes his dictionary, which probably won’t ever happen, the biggest dictionary in the world will still be the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s enormous. We don’t have one. It’s too expensive. Instead we have a condensed OED. The cover is as navy as a bruise. I looked up the word navy in it and found that this word shares a history with nausea and navel from the Sanskrit na or sna or snu, which means to bathe as in the word snake. Unwound language can look like the white cord of unwound brain. It can be dangerous to unwind some words. Jude wasn’t in the Navy. He was in the Army and army comes from ar—to fit, to join, see art, see inertia, the dictionary says.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“While I wait for the police to come, I call Russell to confess what happened. He is my favorite person, the one who somehow sees me both as I want to be seen and as I actually am, the one whose belief in me over the years has been the most earned (he is not my parent), the most pure (he is not my boyfriend), and the most forgiving (he is my friend).”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“By living, I am, by default, leaving him.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“I never found any art thieves who really compare to Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine. Nearly everybody else did it for money, or stole a single work of art. The couple is an anomaly among art stealers, but there does exist a group of criminals for whom long-term looting in service of aesthetic desire is common. In the taxonomy of sin, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine belong with the book thieves. Most people who steal large quantities of books are fanatic collectors, and there have been enough of these thieves that psychologists have grouped them into a specialized category. They’re called bibliomaniacs. This is Breitwieser’s tribe.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Someday I’d like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said.”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“That’s something you forget when you’ve been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work. I found a parking space a short”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“Cats are not coldhearted!” I said. “They’re only protecting their dignity, in case they get rejected. ‘I’ll just reject you first,’ they’re saying.”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“I forgot about him, basically, and in the rare moments when he came to mind I wondered what had ever drawn me to him. Why had I, who truly loved my husband—at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe/maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman—broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“I thought you were vegetarian!” “I am, but I’ve never really felt that chickens were sentient beings.”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize that you daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“How do I explain a home to you, Bean? We fill them with dirt and dust and dishes and cat hair. Spend all our time looking on big and small screens at other people’s homes, wishing they were ours. Drive to places like IKEA in hopes that our homes will look more like the homes on our screens.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel

“The man you marry is the man you get, my mother used to say. Meaning: men don’t change. My mother didn’t expect much from men. Not that she was immune to their charms. Men delighted her, fascinated her, the way tourists lean out of the car window to watch a tiger grooming itself in the sun. But nobody’s jumping out of the car for a tiger hug, you know? That was my mother, hands inside the vehicle, hands to herself, men better left sleeping outside in the jungle.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt: A Novel