Thunderstruck & Other Stories Quotes

“Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“The finger-biter’s feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree—they may have started in something real, but she’d tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“All she really wanted was to go to her apartment, to her bedroom, to the back of her walk-in closet, to sit among the shoes.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They're listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories