Shirley Quotes

“I didn't know I was lonely. I didn't know there was another way to be.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“Acquire your own sins. This one is mine,”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“You think you know what you can handle, and what you can't. But the truth is, almost anything is endurable. Because we're made that way, to make the best of what we have.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“i am the pebble in your italian loafers (also the reason you can own them). i am the shadow that curves over the swollen cracked plaster in barry's ceiling, waking him in fear when the moon is bright. i am the acrid taste that flows from the kitchen taps after heavy rains. i am after you, i am part of you, i am everywhere, i love you.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“Pain has an element of blank; it cannot recollect when it began, or if there was a time when it was not.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“An adventure can begin without warning, that the most minor decisions—right, left—can change lives in a moment. That friendships, even the best of them, don't always survive. Oh, and this: that so much of what happens can't ever be proved—the best we can do is write out paltry tales.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“We slip, we careen through time. We slide, we lurch back to our beginnings.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“A childhood like mine is a cancer; you know it will spread and alter everything it touches, and when you want to preserve the good things, you would be foolish to let them near such poison.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“It mattered, oh, it mattered more than anything, to believe that if there had to be women in danger, there would be those who found them.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“I knew myself a heroine. No better way to clean a stranger’s hairs from a sink basin than to imagine oneself a poetic figure burdened by an unraveling story—”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“I did not cry [...] I did not think. I simply sat, and watched and waited. One road had closed, one path to resolution. I would never make it up with her, never get to apologize or tell her what she'd meant to me. I would not be her friend again. I had not conceived this possibility.
Forgiveness. I hoped she had forgiven me.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“At a table, in a public library, on a winter Saturday, and yet I felt as if I'd arrived home. That house in North Bennington, another winter ten years earlier, and I as young as a girl could be and yet as old as any other Mother Earth, and I had learned what it was to love. How to be loved and how to provide love, and how to be of service as a gesture to the gods. Had I known how fast it would all go, how little it would amount to, would I have lived each day more consciously? Ah, me. I don't have the faintest idea.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“dead, i have one thing that you do not. i never age. i curse you to wrinkles and strands of grey hair swept across the dome of your balding head. i curse you and i hate you and i will not leave you. because i love you.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“we were students; you read my story in the threshold. you said to your roommate, 'this woman has something. i'm going to meet her.' you told him. 'and if she's anything like her writing, i'm going to marry her.' wasn't i? wasn't i?”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“Because while we pretend we have choice about who we love, it isn't actually true.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“Conditions of absolute reality have a glare all their own, like sunspots on water or the glinting of ice against a mountain boulder on a cold Vermont afternoon. You think you know where you are, you are sure of what you've lived through, and yet, at the same time, the whole thing seems a dream. Perhaps this makes it easier to believe.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“all the tainted souls I had not been smart enough to fear.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“Anyone whose parents have failed them loves Roethke more than any other poet, I suppose.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“A veritable nesting doll of nurture—house, me, baby—in sweet placental drift.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“Was there any spell inside these musty pages that could turn such a flawed being into someone I’d be proud to call my mother? I didn’t think so.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“One day, I would be in charge of something, a store or a family. Literally anything. I dreamed of firm decisions, impeccable in their correctness. In”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley

“My own family wasn’t dirt poor. Nothing so romantic. We were city poor, meaning that I was invisible every single day of my young life. Invisible on the street, in school, at home. Invisible, except when creditors came looking for my parents: Mr.”
― Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley