Elizabeth Graver > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Ken sos tu? I am Rebecca (Rivka, Rebekah) from my mother’s mother and the wife of Isaac in the Bible. The name means “to tie firmly” or “to snare,” which is why—or so her mother used to tell her when she struggled at sewing—she could, with practice, become skilled with a needle and thread. I am Camayor, from my mother’s father, Behor Camayor of blessed memory, and also Cohen, high priests descended from the sons of Aaron, a name
she feels she must live up to, though she’ll hide it as needed and may God forgive her. I am from the pomegranate tree my father planted at my birth, from my nuns in white habits, my staircase
with the worn ninth tread, the candlelight reflected in my fingernails. I am a gypsy girl, because to have no home place had once seemed romantic and she could do the dance, just as she could climb ropes at gymnastics, rising and lowering at will. Or was it actually that home, back then, was everywhere?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood: A Poignant Memoir About Parents and Passion in 1950s Pittsburgh

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories

“Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
― Grace Paley

“He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her

“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry. ”
― Robert Pinsky

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“He loves to stop on the corner and watch the ceramics fixer write numbers on the insides of the shards of a broken vase, drill tiny holes, brush the edges with egg white and secure them with wire, an act that gives him hope that anything shattered might, with enough skill and patience, be repaired. He loves the workshop of his music teacher, Oktay, on a narrow street deep in a Muslim quarter, the shop like a birdcage, hung with drying lengths of cane that Oktay fashions into neys, woodwind flutes whose sound—it was Rumi who said it—is not wind but fire.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Where are you going, where have you been?
Do you have children? How was the voyage? What is the news of the world? What can I do for you? Please, sit. Eat. She’ll give them the name of Villa Erna, the pension on Carrer del Modolell run by a Jewish family, and Café Cómico, where the Sephardim can learn about jobs, and for the Ashkenazim, the corner café on Còrsega, where they might find Yiddish speakers. Tell them you’ve been to us, she says warmly. Say you’re a friend of a friend.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”
― Henry James, The art of fiction