State of Paradise Quotes

“The human mind is a great thicket of mystery. So much remains unknown. And yet we are expected--in fact required--to live our lives alongside this inscrutable entity that might, at any moment, turn on us.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Sometimes we are called back to the things we most want to flee, perhaps because they left such a mark that we don’t know how to leave them behind.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Do you have any ChapStick?” the factory co-worker asks me on the way home. I covertly slip my hand under my shirt and slide two fingers into my belly button. I pull out the ChapStick and pass it to him. “This ChapStick is the perfect temperature,” he says as he spreads it across his lips.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“It was around this time that I started to wonder if the wilderness is not something a person can choose to leave. Rather it is a place that lives inside us. A landscape with its own intelligence and design.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“I ask the woman in white if it bothers her to peddle books that have nothing real or true to say about the world. "Please," she says, with a flick of the hand. "Real and true are overrated, in this line of work. Haven't you seen what it's like out there? Real and true are what people read to get away from.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“I go to the pages on the coffee table, curious to see what upset my sister. The more I read the more it becomes clear that my mother is now an advocate for the voluntary human extinction movement. The problem with every utopia, my mother writes, is that they are designed for people. When in fact there cannot be a utopia with people in it. When in fact we are the problem.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Meanwhile, I have started carrying a small spiral-top notepad and a black pen with me. I am in need of a new system for processing reality.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Perhaps we think we can destroy the places of our past by returning: by reimagining, rebuilding. A utopia is, after all, a thing that rises from disaster, ruin, rubble. Without all that failure there can be no such thing as a utopia, since there would be no other reality to compare it to.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“People love to read about things that are impossible, the assistants tell me. And time travel is trending because people are desperate to believe there are other dimensions beyond the one we currently occupy.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“My brother-in-law has admitted that the anonymity makes his job much easier, as it would be difficult to inflict suffering on a person you had to face daily, an outlook that accounts for many things about our sad era, including the current state of the internet.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“The problem, I have decided, with people who never leave home is that they are never forced to become someone else.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“In the ER, a voice asked, "Do you know where you are?" I only knew I was trapped inside a great pandemonium. A horrific brightness. Even these days I am, at times, surprised to find myself unsure of my whereabouts. For example, I thought that I was pretty well acquainted with the world I lived in, but then the pandemic happened and that world transformed into something else.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“My mother says that groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans will soon become extinct, that their members are all old and dying out, but when I look up this chapter online I see young white men--college age or even younger--in the photos. They all look to be the same type of white: blondish, sweaty, pink. White is a sickness that is passed on and on.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Our father had a gift for convincing people to follow him into the wilderness, a quality that made him both dangerous and magical. He spent the whole of his adult life in Florida and that is how I have come to think of this place too, as equal parts danger and magic.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Samuel Beckett once described tears as 'liquefied brain,' and that was just how I felt; everything inside me was being melted down into one trembling pool.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“The walls are lined with Bankers Boxes and plastic bins. These boxes contain things like rag dolls with missing eyes and tablecloths permanently marred with mustard stains because my mother does not believe in throwing anything away. In her opinion, failures of foresight are the worst kind.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“How did we wind up here, shipwrecked at my mother's house? In Florida, this is a question I ask myself every day.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“All our adult lives we have been apartment people; houses are an immense and wondrous mystery. So much space. So many things that can go wrong.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“My husband says he feels like he's an extra in Jurassic Park except someone has turned all the dinosaurs miniature. In Florida, nature is seductive and full of vengeance. To live here is to engage in a ceaseless battle to keep the outdoors from coming in, but in this instance there is absolutely nothing to do but admit defeat: there are hundreds of thousands of lizards out there, with bodies malleable enough to slip through the smallest crack. This is why it's important to know how to catch lizards in mason jars, so we can help them rejoin the countless hordes outside. My mother's backyard is so full of lizards that the grass undulates of its own accord.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“I've started taking photos of the cats with my phone, which they do not appreciate. When the camera appears they look away, flick their tails, spring up and shoot underneath a house, dive into some brush. Save for this one cat that stared right into the camera, orange and royal as a lion. A few nights later, on an evening walk with my dog, we pass ten cats, all stretched out in the scorched crabgrass behind a neighbor's back door. They watch us as we pass, their furred heads turning slowly at the same time. They look like they are casually dreaming of murder. Like they are guarding a portal to the underworld. Like they have been alive since the dawn of earth.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“My husband is nervous about a lot of things down here, like the monstrous size of the fire ants and the quality of the gasoline, because half the time the gas stations are out, the nozzles bundled up in black garbage bags, or the credit card readers don't work or the attendant is a shirtless man with a hip flask tucked into the waistband of his shorts. I keep trying to explain that this is a place with its own laws.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“In Florida I count cats. I first started counting the cats--a mix of strays and outdoor pets with collars and bells--while walking the dog and soon realized that we are hopelessly surrounded. Cats lounge on driveways and front lawns, crouch like gargoyles on porch railings and fence post, lurk in the bushes and under cars and behind trees, peer out from underneath crawl spaces. The derelict houses in the neighborhood appear to have been overtaken by cats--they crowd the decaying front porches, use the walls as scratching posts--and nearly all the non-derelict houses have what my husband and I refer to as a "stoop cat.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“I left Florida to become a student of literature, which I did not enjoy as much as I had anticipated. For one thing, I struggled to understand my classmates, who all knew how to style winter scarves. Each time I tried to wear a winter scarf I felt like I was being strangled.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Desperation can make people mercenary like that--you spot an exit and you start running toward it and you don't look back. You just do your best to convince yourself that the other person is right behind you.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“A place outside time. This is the phrase I overhear my husband using as he tries to describe Florida to his father over the phone. His father lives in a high-rise condo in New Jersey, and he is concerned that we are still down here. On the news, there is constant talk about Florida’s post-pandemic spiral. Speculation about whether the state is experiencing an ecological and spiritual succession. There is talk about militias creeping out of the swamp. There is talk of vandals. There is talk of literal highway robbery. (Our Cro-Magnon governor denies any of this is happening, even though there are reports that some of these forces are amassing in his name.) For the time being, I can ghostwrite my books and shop specials at the grocery and take my niece to the water park, but no one knows how much longer this version of our world will last. “Sometimes I can’t believe a place like this exists,” my husband says as we speed down a gleaming white limestone road that cuts through a palm forest, or ride an airboat around a swollen lake. Florida has a past, as all places do, but these days everyone is uncertain about its future.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“My mother has taken an interest in utopian texts, now that Florida seems to be heading in the opposite direction, though every time she describes one of these alleged paradises they sound a little terrifying. Too much manual labor and religious fervor. In the end, my mother often seems disappointed by these utopias too; she is still searching for her true north.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“In Florida, a summer storm can feel like the end of the world is being summoned. These storms roll in most afternoons, which is to say there is a regular feeling of apocalypse.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Is it possible for a fever to turn a body so hot that molecules are rearranged?”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Everyone, it seems, is more desperate than they were before.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Sometimes I wonder what we are supposed to do with our memories. Sometimes I wonder what our memories are for. A latch slips and the past floods in, knocking us flat. We leave places and we don’t leave places. Sometimes I imagine different versions of myself in all the different places I have ever lived, inching through time in parallel.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise