Idle Grounds Quotes

“On the way home she would have made a pit stop at Dairy Queen so we couldn’t say she hadn’t fed us and before we went inside to our parents she would have told us we’d been a terrific help, and although we’d probably spent most of the day accruing minor injuries and misplacing key items, we would have felt this to be true.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“A river is a feeling more than a sound. It makes an animal of you, is what I’m saying: you become the constituent parts, no more, no less. Some people may find relief in that but not me.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Anyway, I think about the lilac swing a lot, especially now that I’m older and most of us have families and jobs of our own and our hopes and disappointments have just become features of our lives we can tour like those bodies at Pompei.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“We started to laugh. The laughter started outside of us, I’m sure of it, I would really like to say that’s true.

It was silvery and clean. It was polite and spiteful.

“Please,” Autumn said aloud.

It was the laugh of people in shade looking at people in the baking sun. Our laughter grew outward and we started, of all things, to applaud.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Come on!” We were full of encouragement and hatred.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Here is what it was like: it was like coming across a haughty woman with no clothes on strolling across her lawn in the early morning, like you’re just a perverted squirrel in the bushes and that’s why she’s doing it in the first place. You’re just the prop and the audience and the fall guy rolled into one.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Beezy didn’t like birthdays and she didn’t like weakness either. But my feeling is that whereas before her illness she found weakness deplorable, after the illness she found it funny. It was the sort of humor you could get out of an old-fashioned clown with open-top shoes and turned-out pockets. A humorless kind of humor. Or maybe it’s the essence of humor, maybe humor is braided with misfortune and if it’s not tragic it’s not funny.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Once in a while he brought the remaining egg up close to his nose and breathed on it huff huff. It looked lonely and important at the same time, which is often the case with only children.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“At various points in our lives we had considered joining the circus, a daydream handed to us, in fact, by our parents. If we got mad and were casting around for something to do about it, our parents would suggest with great mirth that we run away to join the circus and eventually it became a concrete possibility in our minds, a genuine emergency hatch through which we could slip if things became too unbearable. Although we hadn’t been to a circus, we had ideas of what it might entail: days of trundling along in painted wagons and stringing cooking pots over rosy fires and sitting in front of mirrors lit up by light bulbs as large as conference pears, broken up by spurts of action in which we tested our fantastic discipline against the messy and somewhat arbitrary nature of death. I don’t think it’s something kids think about anymore and anyway we never did it. We stayed right where we were, which our parents always knew would be the case and also why they’d offered it up like a dare in the first place. It was unkind but also their way of reaffirming the cords that bound us.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“We were an absolute herd.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“…and there’s also something about Strom Thurmond, whose name always sticks with me because it sounds like Lobster Thermidor, which is a dish that calls for washing head cavities in white wine.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“What I’m trying to get at here is a question that none of us have been able to answer, which is: So?”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Anyway, because of Beezy’s patrician vibe and the fact that our parents grew up in a very horses-and-beeswax part of an already pretty aristocratic area of the state, you would have thought they were marked for success. You would have thought they couldn’t have avoided it! But well into their youth each of the five really did their utmost to scupper their own chances in life in utterly idiosyncratic ways, which is the usual province of the middle-to-upper-middle class. We didn’t realize this at the time, of course. To us, our parents were doing just fine.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Frankie swam up suddenly from inside herself.

“Oh, you kids,” she said in a soggy, muffled sort of way. We couldn’t see any marks on her face. Her arms dangled on either side of her chair. “I hope you know how special you are.”

We nodded. Our parents and the TV told us on the regular.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“It was, looking back on it, a lovely meal but not the raucous saccharine orgy we had originally envisioned. It was something to do with the car not appearing when it should have, I believe, and I believe that it was probably our first adult meal, consuming something delicious against a backdrop of foreboding.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“You have to understand that despite the better angels of our nature, a body needed food.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“It was enough to make us weep and that’s when we realized that we were too hungry to do any of this correctly. We were getting agitated.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Forests are really just a repetition of patterns; it’s why people lose their minds in forests and also on oceans. The human brain needs disruption, I think, and that’s why we make things. You could say that an artist, for instance, finds patterns in everything but I think probably what an artist is really there to do is to tear a big hole in the maddening patterns, to create something that is so itself that it repels everything around it. I’m all for artificiality, is what I’m saying. It’s what humans bring to the table.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“When was Beezy’s birthday?” we’d asked the grown-ups a while ago and been told that Beezy hadn’t celebrated her birthday, not since she could help it. It was a foreign concept to us, not celebrating your birthday, though I suppose when someone dies they become all their ages at once so it doesn’t really matter.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“And kids, despite obliviousness to many things like etiquette and social cues, are hugely in tune with sadness, especially their parents’. And what did our parents have to be sad about? Lots of things, it turned out, though it’s possible they were overly sad, which is called being maudlin. Or maybe they were sad about all the wrong things, that was possible too. They were sad about politicians and people they once knew who were dead or had changed so much they might as well have been dead, parking restrictions, library closures, and more private sadnesses that we had no access to.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Sometimes she won’t listen,” he said, “when she’s mad.”

We knew this. Not about Abi but about ourselves. Now that we thought about it, we probably didn’t know Abi at all.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“We didn’t know what to hope for, thing or nothing. Thing meant that our day, only somewhat extraordinary, would become truly remarkable, but it would also mean that whatever else we feared—a woman sewing us into our beds while we were asleep, for example—was possible even if it wasn’t probable. It opened things up in ways both surprising and permanent.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Do you guys want to see something?”

Yes, we said. We always want to see something.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“It was interesting in that we were excluded entirely but after a while we got restless and went inside, where there were some more of us sitting on the steps that went up to the bathroom and bedrooms and this lot was talking among themselves like birds before they fly off in one jaggy but coordinated movement. There were ten of us cousins give or take and the tallest and also the oldest one was Travis. He was twelve. He looked at us with his long, swinging jaw, trying to weigh us up. Time had passed since the last time we’d all been together, his face said, but blood was blood.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“Frankie had built the house herself. She’d built it so far back from the road that you forgot leaving was an option.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“It's the shock of the thing, is what I'm saying, and my new and somewhat untested theory is that when something is shocking it also seems unfair even when it isn't. A shock disrupts the normal flow of things and what is normal usually feels the same as what is fair and I guess what philosophy and history and all sorts aim to do is to prize these two things apart, what is normal from what is fair, but only ever after the fact. Only, actually, when it’s too late for the people involved.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“In Amélie, the protagonist finds a tin box of childhood memorabilia in her wall, and though it just looks like a bunch of old shit, the extreme care with which it was curated and then hidden makes it clear it was precious to some person of the past and hence to Amélie, who needs, the film posits, to get a life. Adults watching this scene are often very moved. It brings back to them, I think, a time when the smallest things take on a significance that even the largest things later on down the line can’t match. To a child watching, however, I imagine there is just the ball-ache of being found out - it was such an excellent hiding place and such bad luck that Princess Diana had to go ahead and die at that very moment, and children love to hide things because they’re given no sanctuary.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds