The Giant's House Quotes

“I had never wanted to be one of those girls in love with boys who would not have me. Unrequited love - plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing - turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn't want, couldn't use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness.

Neither could James. He understood. In such situations, you do one of two things - you either walk away and deny yourself, or you do sneaky things to get what you need. You attend weddings, you go for walks. You say, yes. Yes, you're my best friend, too.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Books remember all the things you cannot contain.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“People think they're interesting. That's their first mistake.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't everyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? . . .Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Other people's happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you're left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn't ever noticed.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“but a library is a gorgeous language that you will never speak fluently.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“No one has asked me a question yet, but I will not shut up.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Patty Flood and her good mood were starting to get on my nerves. Her mood was so good it was almost a physical thing, a monkey on a leash that she let leap all over the furniture, delighting only its owner.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Single people eat sadly--they cobble together things left from shopping trips based on dreams of all the meals they'd fix for themselves, all the ways they'd treat themselves to something grand; those dreams, for me, died by the next day and, despite my best hopes, I wanted only canned hash and apples.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“All librarians, deep down, loathe their buildings. Something is always wrong—the counter is too high, the shelves too narrow, the delivery entrance too far from the offices. The hallway echoes. The light from windows bleaches books. In short, libraries are constructed by architects, not librarians.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“I do not like public ceremony, not graduations, not weddings; not pep rallies, nor church. Perhaps I simply do not understand trying to share one emotion (love, relief, faith, pep) with a quantity of strangers.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Though my love for you is infinitesimal, your eyes are as dewey as any old decimal.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“But you cannot fly away from people who have flown away from you; you cannot fly into your own arms.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don’t get married, then what you saved isn’t worth anything. It’s like Confederate money. You’re bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it.”
Caroline to Peggy”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“She had a rear end as big as an open dictionary and a bad attitude.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“But you can’t spend your life hoping that people will ask you the right questions. You must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask. Otherwise you’re dreaming of visiting Venice by driving to Boise, Idaho.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable. As soon as I realized that, New York lost much of its charm for me.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“For instance, it is a scientific fact that she shares his genes. We live in his house, among his possessions. And in every way his the one who brought her to me, which is one of reasons I love her-though much to my misanthropic amazement, not the only reason. He was my one, true husband and love, and he would have loved her best....”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“You could believe in God, looking at James. He looked at himself, and decided not to.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House