The Unfinished World and Other Stories Quotes

“Eventually decomposition strips you bare, even in that solid oak you've taken the shape of. You've helped, finally, to enrich something around you, by feeding the soil with your skin and fat and muscle. Now the soil is full of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and especially nitrogen. Now the soil is supremely satisfied, and you'd be okay with that. You always did like growing things. You always were better with plants than people.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She wants him like she wanted to fly from the rooftop when she was ten, wants to throw her whole body into that catastrophe until she is utterly exhausted and dried up.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Death is the opposite of lonely, and lonely is the only thing the janitor owns. It is the only thing that's hers. And that makes loneliness beautiful, out here among the cold and bright beginnings.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“It hurts not to watch her, that’s how bright she is, like light off glass.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Was that the point of suffering: to understand, in some way, what you still had? To clarify it, to rip the stars from the sky and hold them in the hand like diamonds‒to darken all the rest but the most glittering, glad memories? Was that the way to live a sunny life?”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She doesn't know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Sure that starlight will strip away the years, will fall upon a thirteen-year-old girl alone on a dirt road, a bruise on her face and the mop clenched painfully in her broken fist. The things, the nightmare things fear could claim you for. The dark hurts in the veins, the heart-deep hurts in the buried parts of the body. The faces that chase her, even now, even in the farthest fields of space where nothing grows, nothing whispers, nothing lives or dies but the first things that ever got made in the universe. She isn’t sure whether she believes in God or not, though she always told her pastor she did. She isn’t sure any woman ought to believe in God.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Everywhere there is fever and passion, everywhere a need to burn, burn, burn out the hurt. We write, we sing, we paint, and still the blackness follows, still the dead are there in every note, every brushstroke. We ride and ride, farther and faster and still, still the ghosts ride with us, keep pace behind us, mock all our efforts to smoke and sweat them out.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“He understood that the most important things in the world were the kind you made up for yourself.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She was her father’s daughter but she’d inherited her mother’s black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“This is love for me, she said. I am not a good woman, she said. I am the end of all things, she said. This was at the beginning. He shook his head. You are life, he said, and I invite you in.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She isn't sure whether she believes in God or not, though she always told her pastor she did. She isn't sure any woman ought to believe in God.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“Go forward. There's no flying back to the far-gone past.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories