Dead Letters Quotes

“No one wants the complete picture, the whole story. It would leave no room for the fictions we need to tell ourselves about ourselves.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“I’m not a fucking secretary. I didn’t become a feminist so I could end up tapping out correspondence”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“It’s maddeningly painful not to be able to speak with the dead. But maybe what Zelda was trying to tell me is that it’s nearly as difficult to speak with the living.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“You know, you can start all kinds of relationships in your life,” Nadine continues. “But you only start life once. And you start it with a limited number of people. Those people, they do something to you.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“People must be terrified of losing all mystery.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“I wonder if this is what so terrifies people about digital technology, the idea that there will be a record of every moment, every mistake, every bad poem or carelessly carved-out letter.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“I stop in exasperation and almost storm out of the Airstream, fed up with myself and with my sister, filled with that itchy combination of fatigue and anxiety that my entire family produces in me. An allergic reaction for which antihistamines can do nothing. I want a drink.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“very hard not to think about what I’m leaving and where I’m heading. Traveling this way across the Atlantic has always seemed cruel; you leave Europe at breakfast and arrive in the United States in time for brunch, exhausted and ready for happy hour and dinner. The sun moves backward in the sky. You face your bushy-tailed friends and relatives having been awake for fifteen strenuous hours, having spent those hours exiled in the no-place of airports and airplanes. Forever returning to Ithaca. Or Ithaka. I will be collected from the tiny airport and brought to my childhood home, fifty yards from where my twin sister is supposed to have crackled and sizzled just a few days earlier—all before dinner. I wonder if the wreckage is still smoldering. Does wreckage ever do anything else? We have been twenty-five for nearly one month. I will walk into the house, instantly accosted by the smell, the smell of childhood, my home. I will walk upstairs, to my mother’s room. If it’s even one minute after five (and it likely will be, by the time I make it all the way upstate), she will be drunk or headed that way, and I will sit with her and pour each of us a hefty glass of wine. We will not discuss Zelda; we never do.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“Surrounded by all these physical traces, I wonder what it will be like to go to kindergarten fifteen years from now. Whether kids will practice their letters on iPads instead of these lined papers, yellowed and curled and horrifically fragile.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“I know that I’m merely forestalling the moment when there will be no more books to read, when I’ll reach the end of the fifth book and will have to wait in agony for the sixth. And then the sixth will be finished, and the seventh, and the bottle will be dry forever. But right now, all I want is my next fix.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“I know that I’m merely forestalling the moment when there will be no more books to read, when I’ll reach the end of the fifth book and will have to wait in agony for the sixth. And then the sixth will be finished, and the seventh, and the bottle will be dry forever.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“The letters of our DNA signify our origins, even if they can’t inscribe our futures.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“Thirty minutes later, I’m left with a few wads of cash and a dildo but no more drugs.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters

“Few things are more shameful than insolvency in a country where poverty is a moral failing.”
― Caite Dolan-Leach, Dead Letters