Your Duck Is My Duck Quotes

“It’s odd—no matter how you feel about a place, it’s as though you exchange something with it. It keeps a little bit of you, and you keep a little bit of it.” “I know,” he said. “And the thing you mostly get to keep is leaving.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“Pretty girls are not to be envied. Because when a boy sees a pretty girl, he does not see a real person. He sees a mirror of his own desires, and he falls in love with the mirror. Boys put a pretty girl on a pedestal.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“I was looking out at cliffs and the sea, all sluiced in delicate pinks and yellows and greens and blues, as if the sun were imparting to the sleeping rock and water dreams of their youth, dreams of the rock’s birth in the earth’s molten core, the water’s ecstatic purity before it was sullied by life—as if the play of soft colors were the sun’s lullaby to the cliffs and the sea, of endurance and transformation.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“language . . . what exactly was it, and how did it happen? Celeste shrugged. “Some people think it was just business as usual—mutation, adaptation, selection, mutation, adaptation, selection, a slow continuity kind of thing, for hundreds of thousands of years. But other people think it happened incredibly fast, within about forty thousand years. And that this capacity that made it possible—this built-in capacity for the operation that lets us merge expressible things into other expressible things to make more and more complex expressible things—appeared in an instant! Which makes complete sense, even though it could not be more bizarre. One tiny molecular irregularity in one tiny fetus, in a very small population of humans somewhere in Africa! One instant! A universe-altering mutation!” “But what about . . . ,” he began, but ran aground. “What about the other stuff? The stuff we can’t manage to think?” “Yeah,” he said. “Or . . . well, I mean, yeah.” “Uh-huh, that’s a problem. Actually, Friedlander was pretty interested in that. In his opinion, language developed as a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does. According to him, we can formulate like a fraction of what’s inside our heads and that what’s inside our heads is mostly . . . drainage, basically, sloshing around, that doesn’t have too much to do with what’s actually out there . . .” They looked at each other, and vague shapes, like amoebas, rose, morphed, blended, and faded between them. “But at least it’s all ours,” she said. “It’s the main unique thing we’ve got. It’s our gift.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“she just seemed to have been put together more on purpose than other people.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“It’s not so hard to figure out why I’m not sleeping. What I can’t figure out is why everybody else is sleeping.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“Beyond the apartment’s walls, in the night sky of his closed eyes, little lights charted the streets and broad avenues, the apartments and clubs of late revelers, the tall towers, where five or six guys he knew, guys only a few years ahead of him, would be toiling, even at this hour, in their big chairs, the vast windows of their offices overlooking the city, overlooking the planet with its mines and wells, its fields and great waterways, as they steered Earth’s course by the graphs and instruments of their predecessors’ devising into the hidden future.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“They would sit down at the bar, Mr. Perfect and the girl, and the predictable theatrics would start right up, so the moment he appeared I’d resign myself to a night of watching a wallet flirt with a price tag. Mr.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“And as she talks, I concentrate on spreading out my substance, making myself spongy to absorb the puffiness into myself, to absorb the pain radiating through her feet and legs and back.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“Sure she wanted him to be someone else, or at least sort of someone else. Pretty much everyone wants everyone else to be at least sort of someone else, don’t they?”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

“Galicia. I contemplate the beautiful name as it unfolds, disclosing delicate, prancing, caparisoned horses and the lovely princesses riding them whose undulating red hair reaches to the carpet of flowers beneath the hooves. “You could always tell the Jews from Galicia by their red hair,” my aunt says dreamily.”
― Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories