Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories Quotes

“At sixteen, I would say my mother was a drunk. Twenty years later, I could say she was an alcoholic. But the right words, like my compassion and understanding, are two decades too late.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“Gentleness, even when it is a substitute for love, is not a thing one can refuse”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“Only the young can hope like that—without reason, without proof. If I once held that much hope in my heart, it has faded away. Now I only believe in what I can see and taste and feel. That is what’s real—not hope, not dreams.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“Other people have clocks to keep track of the time. My mother knows the time by the length of my father’s sighs.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“The world held so many possibilities that daylight hours were not sufficient.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“I have never had much luck understanding the hidden messages behind my nocturnal imaginings. Sometimes, I could brush them off in the light of day like so many cobwebs—vague and insubstantial. Others were not so easy to dismiss. They lingered like a damp fog chilling my bones. Some, like the dreams of phone calls from some unnamed person, return again and again to haunt me.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“Not that I’ve been exposed to large amounts of radiation or dangerous chemicals. At least, not that I know of. On the other hand, do we really know what’s out there?”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“But I absolutely, categorically did not set the fire. (That’s sixteen syllables’ worth of denial, in case anyone is counting.)”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Although I do remember giving my second-grade teacher a concussion when I hit her with a large edition of Webster’s Dictionary. Does that count?)”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“It has been my own experience that strange things quit happening when other people are around. Sometimes, it can be very disappointing.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“The meadow was lined along one side with tall oak trees—very big, with lots of scratchy bark. Oak trees are so strong, so immovable—just the ticket when the earth suddenly began to rotate a bit faster than normal. I wrapped my arms around the rough trunk and waited to see what would happen next. Something always happens, it seems. The rotation built up speed like an out of control merry-go-round. I held on tightly so I wouldn’t spin off into the darkness—a helpless victim of centrifugal force. It was frightening but quite exhilarating as well. I stayed like that for hours, my body pressed against the coarse skin of my rescuer, while the earth spun away in the darkness. And the mad twisting didn’t slow until dawn broke over the hillside and cars began appearing on the roadway. Was the world just tired of turning? Or was it all those bodies that slowed it down, exerting some kind of magnetic force against the wild revolution?”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“No point in looking back,” her mother had always said. “You wouldn’t like what you see and you can’t change it anyway.” No”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“You think,’ ‘you think,’” mimicked Margaret, her words tiny thorns unaccompanied by roses. After fifty-five years together, Harold had stopped searching for flowers.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“Now, the closest she came to traveling to faraway lands was when she slipped away to her room and opened the pages of the travel guides and atlases waiting there. Each day, she ate just a little, husbanding the pages against the time when there would be nothing left to consume. But her escape was temporary and her return inevitable, unlike her father who had escaped forever, although he had to die to do it.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“she’d certainly outlast Alice who, every day, was fading more and more into nothingness like the Cheshire Cat. Except it wouldn’t be her smile that would be the last to go since she never smiled, hadn’t smiled within this hard reality in so long that she wondered if her face muscles remembered which way to contract to make the corners of her lips turn upward.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

“After all, everybody had dreams, even me. I just never figured he really believed in his.”
― Nancy Christie, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories