The End of the Point Quotes

“I love birds, she says dreamily into her son's ear, or maybe she just thinks it, she the one who taught him to name and spot the rare ones-the bar-tailed godwit, the whimbrel and Blackburnian warbler-just as her father had taught her, first from the fields and beach, then from inside, his wheelchair by the window, Petersons and binoculars in his lap, and she'd bike to the salt creek or climb to the top of the Teal Rock and sit there waiting, then ride back and drop her bike on the grass and go inside, to where the names flew from her mouth into her father's ears, a gift for both of them.

"I love birds." She says it again, or maybe for the first time.
"I know," Charlie says.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Now it's dusk, bats swooping and rising along the lawn, against the sea. Would that she could join them-flap wings, fly blind, beat back her foul mood.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward veerse. Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Table salt hardens here. Books mildew. Diaries flip open. Private Property: Please Turn Around.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“To see your mother as a baby, that is what it's like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“The skull is not broken, or only a little, here. He doesn't actually know it's a female, but he wants it to be. Female and a mother, old, died of natural causes. And somewhere in the sea, her young, no longer young. Their young.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Being a father would be different, harder, but might he not (if generations have told themselves the lie, then scan he) do it just a little better than his parents, pass on his best self, discard the rest, or at the very least, do his best by doing his best?”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“In the air the birds are clever, acrobatic, but when they land on the road they turn to lumps of coal, then lift together when a person or vehicle draws near. She watches the flight eddies, the trading of partners, the way the patterns form, dissolve and reconfigure like one machine in motion-yet each bird with its own small, muscled heart...at the same time that she carries a knowledge that she's been seeing these birds year after year (and always here) and that the medium they pass through is not just space but also time.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“I love him too and believe he loves me, but does he like me, which is not the same as love?”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Two whole lives, a person might have. Three or four or five. If only. Never before had she felt this fanning out of possibilities; one life had seemed plenty, difficult sometimes, other times fine. Either way, her lot.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Helen was happy for them, and disdainful, and jealous of them for getting more of each other while she got less of them, and, mostly, astonished-that life could actually move forward like this into adulthood.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“From her mother, Janie learned to play charades and murder in the dark, to run three-legged races, to spot hermit thrushes, towhees (Mrs. P. said the towhee's call was "Drink your tea!"; Bea said it was "Brush your teeth!"), and tell prairie warblers from the maryland yellowthroat and the great horned from the barred owl by their calls.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point