Keely

“We had one horse, one mule, and a wagon. We had Horhay with his limp arm and his long past, and Dickie with his hopes for the necklace now dashed and turned to dread of its curse, and me with my ache for your mother who was destined to take her leave of me, and you with a life before you and a look of puzzlement on your face. We had your mother and her sweet baby to be. All together, it was a untidy mix of items.”
― Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone: A Novel

“I don't worry about writers disappearing," she said, "not really. You can still knit a sweater, or buy a hand-knit sweater, even if most of them are made by machines. But what does it do to people if everything they read is just the upchuck of a very smart computer program?”
― Sean Michaels

“Despite I was tired, it was a comfort to stare at the red and brown stripes of the blanket in the lantern light and move my fingers along them. It was a steady, dependable task, as opposed to every other thing in my life at that moment, which was not currently steady.”
― Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone: A Novel

“Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person's field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte--not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?