Bowlaway Quotes

“...grief looks like nothing from the outside, it looks like surrender, but in fact it is the most terrible
struggle. It is friction. It is a spiritual grinding, and who's to say it cannot produce a spark and heat that, given fuel could burn a good man to the ground.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them--they're on the shore and we're on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“We have, all of us, invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“It was tempting to believe that if you made yourself small and light, beneath notice, you might be allowed to persist nearly anywhere. But meek women were tossed out and forgotten: that was something she had learned from Bertha Truitt herself. What women needed to do was take up space. Become unbudgeable.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Everybody on this earth was born,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“She had forgotten how many minutes of motherhood were devoted to this question, even before Edith's accident. Alive now? And now? The deeper Edith's sleep the shallower her life, it seemed. The extraordinary stillness of a sleeping baby! Look for a breath at the stomach, flush at the cheeks. Then Luetta would leave the room, come back. She lost hours to the question. Alive now, now, now?”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“I'm a princess and sometimes I'm a fairy, and I'm a mermaid too.' I thought she was marvellous. She knew her own worth, she insisted on it. She knew that no matter how miserable the circumstances in which life placed her, she was better than that. She knew that a part of her was special and remarkable, and she was able to articulate that in her own way.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Movie kisses looked like they'd hurt. She couldn't get enough of them. They made her feel alive - not in any expansive way, but assessed, her pulse taken, a rubber mallet to the knee that made her kick.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“They found a body in the Salford cemetery, but aboveground and alive.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“But Jeptha was so amiably stupid everybody was the smartest man he ever met. It was a worldwide tie.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“She was the glow in a darkened theater above a door: EXIT,”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Louetta had recently decided she would be a wonder instead of a beauty. She had seen beauties go mad in middle age as their beauty turned less live and more monumental. Beauty still, but mostly to mark the space where greater beauty once had been. But wondrous was wondrous, even when you outgrew it.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Every month she opened the alleys for a fete. Beer and beef, oysters, pints of ice cream, brandy, a cake riddled with cherries, pies of all sorts (pork, treacle, kidney), more beer. Each fete lasted the entire day, was serially every kind of gathering: in the morning, a party for children, then a ladies' lunch, then a tea, cocktails, then (as the day began to unravel) a light supper, a frolic, a soiree, a carousal, a blowout, a dance, and as people began to drink themselves sober, a conversation, an optimistic repentance, a vow for greatness, love.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“They'd spent too long arranging their lives around their husbands and children; trying to mine happiness from the happiness of other people. Always the first to wake up and the last to go to bed, always the least favored piece of chicken from the dinner platter.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“She’d worn her most ostentatious clothes because she knew that the best camouflage was a kind of flagrancy: you didn’t have to worry how people took you so much if the first thing they noticed was that you were rich.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Our subject is love because our subject is bowling. Candlepin bowling. This is New England, and even the violence is cunning subtle. It still could kill you.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity--you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. It was like luck. Luck once meant anything could happen. Now it meant he was doomed. But maybe it didn't need to.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“Hazel was old, but with children still little: she had an exhausted air of experience, someone who thought a lot of things but actually knew very few.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed ...”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

“What a thing, to marry into a family! What could be more perilous? And yet people did it all the time. They married and had children, every child a portmanteau, a mythical beast, a montage.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway