The Ice Garden Quotes

“When your life is not the primrose path, you still have to walk your road. You have to be a judge, pry right from wrong, figure out what ugly things the good can perch in, too.”
― Moira Crone, The Ice Garden

“The awful thing is, I think she did love me. Living just lacked almost all savor for her, except when she was in one of her rages, or humming and pounding Chopin, or when she first saw something beautiful. She especially liked things so extreme in their beauty you might call them spectacular or ugly. Beauty like that. Nothing else. Nothing in between.”
― Moira Crone, The Ice Garden

“On the barns were peeling painted signs for RC Cola and Chesterfields and Jergen's Furniture and Holmes Appliances. We went around the towns where these stores were. The places practically begged you to take the detours--they put up so many signs for a bypass or a loop road, you would think they were ashamed of anyone actually driving through, seeing them. Our part of the world, I felt, was unpopular to people, and I was already sorry about this.”
― Moira Crone, The Ice Garden

“She was happy just to hold her cup of tea and set it down on a stack of books, right next to another cup she had drunk from the day before. I found this very interesting.”
― Moira Crone, The Ice Garden

“I thought of how she spoke of me as "this child". This child to whom something terrible had happened. I didn't feel like a child, or as if anything had happened to me. I was a different kind of alive then; that was all I knew, and I still feel this. Every day since I have known there is a place in me too raw, torn apart--something unbreakable has toughened over it.”
― Moira Crone, The Ice Garden

“That was their insult for us: soda crackers. It was so mild, when you think of it, given what they could have called us. Given what we called them. To be called a saltine didn't really feel rotten.”
― Moira Crone, The Ice Garden