The Balloonists Quotes

“We had been arguing for hours and it was dark in the room. We sat silently on the couch, I was tapping my foot against the table. He glanced at the green digital glow of the clock. “2:05 is beautiful,” he said. I looked, and it was.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Sonata,” he says, “means ‘sounding together.’ It is an argument in which one theme is presented in opposition to another and they struggle until one wins, in the resolution. It is a beautiful form, it has endured into this century.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“She was poisoned, but the reason she was crying was that her husband didn’t want her anymore.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Black is closing in around my eyes. I realize with a great, tired sadness that I am losing the world. The walls, the molding on the door frame, the yellow of the lamp, his back at the sink… are all achingly beautiful. I reach out and feel myself groping in the air, feel myself falling great distances, feel nothing at all. Suddenly, with a red rush I can breathe and I can see. I get up from the floor before he turns around and says, “You look flushed.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Words like ‘custody’ don’t mean the same thing to him. I don’t want us to own anything together. “You don’t want to be happy,” he accuses me.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“There are some words that seem to well up from inside me without reason. I will be walking along an empty hallway, leaning against the wall of an elevator, looking at the ceiling of my apartment when I find myself saying, “sorry.” But I am not saying it to anyone else, it is only for the sound of the word, the feel of it.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Mother: “Rumi wrote that…roughly…the only thing that will be with you to your grave is your work. Only your work will speak for you after you’re gone.” There”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Sometimes he gives a little flourish with his fingers that makes me wonder if all his movements are a quiet performance.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Whenever a tool is handled with ease and with a minimum of false motions, so that it will produce accurate and satisfactory results, it is handled in the right way. The constant aim of every carpenter, especially the apprentice, should be to eliminate false motions in everything he does.” — Carpenter’s Tools, H. H. Seigele”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I don’t know….” He has been saying this over and over, ending every thought with it. Finally I ask him, “What don’t you know?” He pauses. “Lots of things. Your favorite color, for example.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“The laws of water are very difficult. No matter how many times it is explained to me, I don’t understand how the tides work. I know, of course, that water will seek a level. I know that it will only flow down.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“When he says, “Why can’t you follow a recipe?” I am hurt, because I know that he is not just asking why I can’t be told what to do, but also why I can’t let things be simple.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Things with her, he says, were a disaster in slow motion.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I asked him for a bedtime story. I didn’t really want a story, I just wanted him to talk to me. He couldn’t think of anything. When I woke up he was gone but there was a letter on my bed that began, “So, you wanted a bedtime story….”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“Today I noticed a slim bar of soap lodged deep in the throat of the sink. My fingers can’t reach that far down the drain. It is leaching away into the water, every day.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“We drove past our old house,” the woman told me, “and I noticed that the tree he had watered through the droughts and cared for over the years had been cut down. He must have noticed too. I didn’t say anything. I thought, ‘I won’t talk about it until he does,’ but he didn’t say a word.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I move one seat closer to the couple on the bus. They are holding hands but she is looking out her window and he is looking at his lap. They don’t seem to be mad at each other.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I pause when the man at the register lays down a red carnation with my change, says quietly, “This is for you,” and turns to the next customer. As I am starting my car I see another woman smiling and stepping into her car, holding a white carnation.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“We are not close,” he said, and let the effect linger before he said, “We live five hundred miles apart.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I bent over, sick, and leaned my head against the softness of his stomach. He wrapped his arms around me, rocking gently. He said, “We should take you to the ocean, maybe that’s what you need to feel better.” He sang into my ear, under his breath. Silly songs. “That’s the recipe for making love…”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I was shaking when I asked my mother, “Do you think you eat enough?” She was silent for a long time until she said quietly, “That is between me and God.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“My mother was in the bathtub crying and I was standing outside the door waiting, just in case she decided to slip her head under and keep it there. The other kids were upstairs. The problem was about money, of course. She was afraid she wouldn’t have enough for us to eat.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“He hears his mother and his sister-in-law talk about how lonely it is to be married to a musician, how many nights they spend alone. He wonders if I would be unhappy. I don’t say anything. I like to spend my nights alone.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I come home to an empty house and fill the sink with water. The pigeons above the window are clucking. I let the dishes slip under the bubbles and I close my eyes. I listen to the perfect, whole, round sounds of glass against porcelain under water.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“He thinks I don’t pay attention. He has been talking and I have been silently naming the scents of everything we are crushing under our feet as we walk.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“He is someone who believes he can break things, or he believes that anything can hurt him.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I’m afraid something will happen to my hands,” he says, “I need my hands.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“You know, she used to tear down parts of that house and put them back together herself.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I think I remember him saying that the problem with a tire fire is that it can smolder for years, burning quietly but uncontrollably.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“I wake up afraid that she will be taken and folded up in a closet like clean linen.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists