Improvement Quotes

“People always went for the romantic interpretation; you couldn’t blame them for that. What they felt most strongly seemed most true. But other forces were operating in the world.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“Fierce loyalty. That's how the Kurds survived for two and a half thousand years while the Hitties and the Phrygians died out. Communal Loyalty.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“But people often wanted payment for what they only wished they’d done.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“She wasn’t old—sixties weren’t old nowadays—why was she talking about death?”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“There's no justice in who dies”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“he was in a museum of immaculate dust - and nothing was exactly gone”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“It was one of the mysteries of modern life, what happened to old love.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“His best moment was when he walked up the majestic stairway to the second floor of the Met; he loved the glorious spaces of old exhibition halls. Not that they knew about old here, with buildings always being blasted and rebuilt higher. How did people in this city keep track of themselves, with so much coming at them at once?”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“Nobody talked as much as Kiki did about the possibility of fairness.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“He sent Leah a text--*truck fine miss u like always april too all my lv*--and none of it was a lie. There were burning truths in that message.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“There was more to be said for the power of regret than was often said.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“She understood very well that when you took a good look under a clear, hard light, the world was a fucked-up hellhole. Most people knew this, she’d known this, but nobody wanted to think about it all the time. It didn’t pay to forget for too long.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“there was a real kiss—a sudden revelation of him in tongue and lip.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“And how could the Internet bring him to her, if he wasn’t showing up on his own two feet?”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“I could picture him gray and gaunt, looking out from an armchair, braving the worst. I knew how he’d be; I knew him. He’d be glad to see me by then, more than glad. I could feel myself wishing it were that time now.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“If anyone had unfinished business, he did. If anyone needed more time, he did. He was going to wander for years at the edge of my line of sight.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement

“Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape.”
― Joan Silber, Improvement