Sandra > Sandra's Quotes

“Oh, the pathos of it! - haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defense) may there possibly be?”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“her voice suddenly gone as if it had snagged on the mist and was carried off into the failing light, leaving the phone dead in my hand, a warm sliver with the screen fading like some luminous shard from outer space which had traveled across stellar distances at great speed to arrive here in my hand where its glow was now losing its heat, gone”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow.”
― Ananda Braxton-Smith, Merrow

“When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“They waited until I was asleep, then roused themselves, exhausted as swimmers, grey between the empty trees. Their hair in tufts, open sores where ears used to be, grubs twisting from their chests. The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexities of desires eternally denied.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“The stories are of men who, walking on the shore, hear sweet voices far away, see a soft white back turned to them, and - heedless of looming clouds and creaking winds - forget their children's hands and the click of their wives' needles, all for the sake of the half-seen face behind a tumble of gale-tossed greenish hair.”
― Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

“In a true emergency, there is no place better than a library and no hero more helpful than a librarian - someone who knows where to find exactly the right book for the occasion.”
― Clara Vulliamy, Tiny Tapir Trouble

“If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
― Tim Kreider

“I wish we could go back to that moment. The discovering each other phase. The addictive self-revelation through another's eyes phase.”
― Vivek Shraya, The Subtweet