The Gravity of Birds Quotes

“Before too much longer I’ll forget her minute imperfections. That’s what you end up missing the most, those little faults. They burrow under your skin. Become endearing in retrospect.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“The older I get, the less I enjoy the presence of other people.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“You don’t know what it’s like to worry you’ll start to despise the people who help you, the ones you should love, because they’re healthy and you’re not, because they’re kind and you’re this angry, frustrated . . . thing.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Sarcasm is wasted on those who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, my darling.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Your parents were far from saints, Alice. It would be generous to say they were ordinary people who made some very serious mistakes. Don't make them out to be perfect. That’s too thin a wire for anyone to be able to keep their balance.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“His voice was everything she equated with home.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Alice haunted the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. She was waiting to hear his Austin-Healey throttle back when he careened down the utility road separating the state park from the cabins rimming the lake, but only the whistled conversation of buntings echoed in the branches above. The vibrant blue males darted deeper into the trees when she blew her own 'sweet-sweet chew-chew sweet-sweet' up to theirs. Pine seedlings brushed against her pants as she pushed through the understory, their green heads vivid beneath the canopy. She had dressed to fade into the forest; her hair was bundled up under a long-billed cap, her clothes drab and inconspicuous. When at last she heard his car, she crouched behind a clump of birch and made herself as small as possible, settling into a shallow depression of ferns and leaf litter.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“The older I get, Mr. Lapine, the more I realize it’s sometimes preferable not knowing the answers to things. In fact, I often wish I’d never heard the question.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Your mother was the love of my life. Not everyone gets to have that. I did. Yes, I miss her, but I’m happier being alone and missing her than pretending not to miss her while being with someone else. Does that ridiculous statement make sense?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Isn’t that an odd thing for a parent to wish for a child? That he would be less than what he is?”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“I know you the way I know my own heart, the way I feel my own pulse. I know what your laugh will be, how you wave good-bye, the crescent of thumbnail you worry between your teeth. I have known you from the second you entered this world, and if I were to leave it now, I would know you still, were I to dust or ash.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“He is a principled man, and compassionate, someone who will remind himself of your best qualities while struggling to forgive your worst. In short, he is a friend.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“We turned into each other’s best excuse for not doing the things we were afraid of.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“How long did it take to become a gracious person? One who could accept help and give thanks without being resentful of it?”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“They had lived their older lives like strangers from different shipwrecks, washed up on the same island, without the benefit of a common language.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“I want everyone to stop telling me to lower my expectations.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Saisee wore a path between the kitchen and the living room, bringing out mugs of coffee, and plates barely visible beneath clouds of spoon bread, ambrosia dotted with maraschino cherries- the cheerful red of them an affront to his eyes- and rosy slices of ham.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“She'd loved birds long before her physical limitations kept her grounded. She'd found a birding diary of her grandmother's in a trunk in the attic when she was Frankie's age, and when she asked her father about it, he dug through boxes on a shelf high above her head, handing down a small pair of binoculars and some field guides.
She'd seen her first prothonotary warbler when she was nine, sitting alone on a tupelo stump in the forest, swatting at mosquitoes targeting the pale skin behind her ears. She glanced up from the book she was reading only to be startled by an unexpected flash of yellow. Holding her breath, she fished for the journal she kept in her pocket, focusing on the spot in the willow where he might be. A breeze stirred the branches, and she saw the brilliant yellow head and underparts standing out like petals of a sunflower against the backdrop of leaves; the under tail, a stark white. His beak was long, pointed and black; his shoulders a mossy green, a blend of the citron yellow of his head and the flat slate of his feathers. He had a black dot of an eye, a bead of jet set in a field of sun. Never had there been anything so perfect. When she blinked he disappeared, the only evidence of his presence a gentle sway of the branch. It was a sort of magic, unveiled to her. He had been hers, even if only for a few seconds.
With a stub of pencil- 'always a pencil,' her grandmother had written. 'You can write with a pencil even in the rain'- she noted the date and time, the place and the weather. She made a rough sketch, using shorthand for her notes about the bird's coloring, then raced back to the house, raspberry canes and brambles speckling bloody trails across her legs. In the field guide in the top drawer of her desk, she found him again: prothonotary warbler, 'prothonotary' for the clerks in the Roman Catholic Church who wore robes of a bright yellow. It made absolute sense to her that something so beautiful would be associated with God.
After that she spent countless days tromping through the woods, toting the drab knapsack filled with packages of partially crushed saltines, the bottles of juice, the bruised apples and half-melted candy bars, her miniature binoculars slung across one shoulder. She taught herself how to be patient, how to master the boredom that often accompanied careful observation. She taught herself how to look for what didn't want to be seen.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Facts swooped like swallows, darting across her mind; there was a rush of pride in things still remembered. Singing was limited to the perching birds, the order Passeriformes. Nearly half the birds in the world didn't sing, but they still used sound to communicate- calls as opposed to song. Most birds had between five and fifteen distinct calls in their repertoire; alarm and territorial defense calls, distress calls from juveniles to bring an adult to the rescue, flight calls to keep the flock coordinated, even separate calls for commencing and ending flight. Nest calls. Feeding calls. Pleasure calls. Some chicks used calls to communicate with their mothers while they were still in the egg.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“She pulled off the road when she was halfway there, parking the car in a spot where the grass had turned from supple green to crisp gold. The air in midafternoon was laced with the smell of things gone to ground. Beech leaves curled in on themselves, brushed with the dull finish of autumn; the shadbush blazed scarlet.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Why do we lack the capacity to celebrate small bits of perfection? Unless it's obvious on a grand scale, it's not worth acknowledging. I find that extremely tiresome."
"Birds are perfect. Yet most people completely overlook them."
"Well, if birds are perfect, then you are as well. And I can't imagine anyone failing to notice you, Alice.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“When Alice was younger, her father had fashioned a rough mask from evergreen needles and lake grass glued to a rotten shell of pine bark, shed like a skin. He secured it to the end of their canoe with heavy yellow cord, telling Alice their ancient Dutch relatives believed water fairies lived in the figureheads of ships, protecting the vessels and their sailors from all manner of ills- storms, narrow and treacherous passageways, fevers, and bad luck. Kaboutermannekes he called them. If the ship ran aground, or even worse, if it sank, the Kaboutermannekes would guide the seafarers' souls to the Land of the Dead. Without a water fairy to guide him, a sailor's soul would be lost at sea forever.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart.
"Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Would he stay if he knew she was capable of hatred? That sometimes she felt so full of resentment, there wasn’t room for anything else?”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“The thing she wanted to give him wasn't easily wrapped. If she could cast a spell, she'd offer him this new, slightly careless version of herself, but that person might easily vanish before she boarded the train again.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“I always felt like half of my life was hers, but I wonder if she didn’t feel that half my disease was hers, too.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“You can trust him to do what he says, a trait which becomes increasingly rare.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“People grieve in their own ways. If you’d for once stop worrying about what everyone else thinks and let yourself get close to someone, you might be surprised to find folks understand. You're not the only person in this world who got handed a life different than the one they expected.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Someone telling you about the future did not prepare you for it. Nothing prepared you for it.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“I’ve found I still serve a purpose. I remind people to pray, to calculate the odds, to thank the fates, the gods, good karma, whatever it was that made this happen to me and not them. I’m in the worst sort of club. The one no one else wants to be in.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds