Mary Coin Quotes

“Tell me how you are."
"I'm fine, Mother."
"No one is fine. Fine is a placeholder.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“They had never had anything but now they had nothing. Mary realized how different those two conditions were.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“A picture doesn't bring someone to life. A picture is a death of the moment when the picture is taken. Whenever you look at a picture, time dies again.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“the sorrow she carried around that made her smile come a second too late and made her ears grow dull so that her children would have to call her three or four times before they could get her attention.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under the skin or how to add potatoes to bread to make it heavy so it would fill a stomach faster, she had never explained how she had survived the death of a husband and the loss of a child. Parents never told their real secrets. They never let you know how they lived in the spaces between working and cooking and running after children and counting dollars.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“You'll know who you are when you start losing things,' Doris said.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“What right did she have to take photographs of strangers? But she knew these faces....These people had been made to feel inadequate, abnormal. Their lives were disfigured by circumstance.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“The bones of his hand reminded her of the skeleton of a baby field mouse that Della had once found. It was completely intact, missing only its future.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“For the first time, her singularity, the fact that she felt different from every person she knew, made sense to her, and she realized that no matter where she went in the world, she would have a point of view that no one else could possibly have.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“She knew her death was near because time had begun to fold like a fan so that the past and the present rubbed together in ways that made her feel supple and porous, as if time were moving through her body and not the other way around.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“The next day, Mary walked through the rubble of their destroyed house. They had never had anything but now they had nothing. Mary realized how different those two conditions were.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“. . .[he] knows this, just as he knows that any story told about what has happened in the past can never be certain, that there is always yearning in the piecing together of information. The story of history is the story of its telling and its retelling. There are truths lost to time and desire.”
― marisa silver, Mary Coin

“This was what death would be, too, she imagined: a moment that would happen once and then recur each time it was encountered in memory,”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“kiss is as frictionless as a bug’s wing.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“And what about Vera? If she had all the freedom in the world, what question would she ask?”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“Walker studied the small, twitching motions of his”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin

“Such arrogance. A right of youth, he supposes, a necessity. How else is it possible to face the terrifying void of your unformed self except by claiming absolute intelligence?”
― Marisa Silver, Mary Coin