Contents May Have Shifted Quotes

“If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds...,why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“I'm beginning to understand that when we want to kill ourselves, it is not because we are lonely, but because we are trying to break up with the world before the world breaks up with us.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela vs Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn't the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“Love gets bigger after forty," Fenton tells me. "After forty,, love says, 'Come one, come all.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“Remember this remember this remember this the next time you think it’s over, because some man, or some hope, or some life takes away instead of gives. Remember this and get on an airplane, a small one if possible, because it always works.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

“...the purser has something resembling joy in her voice when she welcomes us to San Francisco. 'I probably don't need to tell you all to open the overhead bins with caution,' she says. 'If your contents haven't shifted, you must be carrying lead weights.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“I still don't see how it would make me feel any better to think of the pain in my hip and spine as anything other than my most loyal and valuable companion, the continuous nonvoice in my ear that says, You got out alive and you still get to go.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“what if you could have all the wisdom of a lifetime and still look like you looked when you were twenty-five'

'or what?' I say.

'what, what' she says.

I say, 'I thought we were playing Would You Rather...?'

She twists her head like a dog at a foghorn. 'Marla,' I say, 'you get the wisdom because you don't anymore look like you did when you were twenty-five.'

She says, 'You don't understand the rules to this game.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“When you do something nice for somebody, it is just like walking around a temple. It is just like saying a prayer.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel