Hall of Small Mammals Quotes

“You're not going to get weird on me, are you?"

"How exactly would I get weird on you?"

"I don't know, but the way you just said weird felt a little weird to me.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Inside every group, he decides, there are more groups. Circles within circles, and inside of those, more circles still, all of them infinitely divisible. You could spend your whole life wondering which ones you're in and which ones you're not and which ones really want you and which ones are holes that have no bottom.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Scientists have discovered something called ‘mirror neurons.’ A mirror neuron is one that will fire in your brain when you perform an action and also when you watch that same action being performed by someone else. Why we have these neurons is a mystery. Maybe they’ve helped us become more empathetic. When you see or read about someone else’s bad news, maybe a part of you is experiencing it too. It occurred to me that when we watch videos of people falling down, we are waiting for the moment of impact- for a bruise, a hurt, a collision, and that expectation makes us full participants in the event. Every fall we see is our own, and all of us are falling all the time.

I wondered if the same would hold true if I reversed the fall. Would our neurons mirror that rising? Are all of us rising right now? Are you?”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Through the metal bars of the jungle gym, she watches two gray squirrels chase each other around a tree. Around and around and around. So gratuitous.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Falling down is the universe being honest with you, finally. It’s life as it really is.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“I am my voice, aren’t I? I don’t know, Mr. Ash says, without turning around. Are you your anus?”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“These videos, he says, come from all over, from everywhere, and, in a sense, the videos belong to all of us. They are our videos, collectively ours, not a part of what’s commonly called the public domain, per se, but as a part of what could be referred to as the proto-public domain, the substrata of all recorded human experience.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“Two nasty, clammy frogs squeezing each other for weeks on end in the middle of some frozen field? Romantic was not the first word that hopped into Mary’s mind, not at all, but then again she understood what her mother was getting at, she really did, two otherwise lonely creatures conjoined, clinging to each other, not giving up on each other, swimming into the dark and watery deep, down to the cold, cold bottom of things where nothing else lives. There was, if you disregarded certain details, such as the sex itself, something beautiful about it…”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“A random act of violence," his mother called it. "A totally senseless thing." Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is random and senseless place.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories