Great Circle Quotes

“We are confined to the present, but this moment we're living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We're celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Does she regret the flight? She decides she doesn’t. She would have peered out of the cockpit and into something bottomless and unfathomable sooner or later. At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“One thing I've learned is that you don't just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.

[Jamie Graves]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Numbness is not an absence of feeling but a felt absence.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too.

[Marian Graves]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“there is too much of the world and too little of life.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Art is distortion but a form of distortion that has the possibility of offering clarification, like a corrective lens.

[Adelaide Scott]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Closure doesn't really exist....That's why we're always looking for it.

[Hadley Baxter]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“You push on men and eventually you get to the bedrock of it all, which is that they think they're better than us. And they're the ones who made this war. I've been thinking about that. We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up. Then when we want to do our part, they're always trying to keep us out of danger. Because heaven forbid we should be allowed to decide for ourselves. Their worst fear is that one day we'll end up owning our lives same as they do.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Being bound to people is the heart of life.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“When you are truly afraid, you experience an urgent desire to split from your body. You want to remove yourself from the thing that will experience pain and horror, but you are that thing. You are aboard a sinking ship, and you are the ship itself.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“What is that around your eyes? You look like a raccoon.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“How could anyone see clearly through the innate haze of self-righteousness?”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“My brother, an artist, said what he wished to convey in his paintings was a sense of infinite space. He knew this task to be impossible, as, even if a canvas could accommodate such a concept, our minds seem incapable of grasping it. But he said he believed, most of the time, that an unachievable intention was the worthiest kind.

[Marian Graves]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“...people's lives don't get preserved like fossils. The best you can hope for is that time will have hardened around someone's memory, preserving a void in their shape.

[Hadley Baxter]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“In her journal, in what’s now Namibia, Marian had written: I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“He reminds her of a statue that has been broken and glued back together, its shape the same but its surface spiderwebbed with cracks.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“The point was to be someone who didn’t treat fear like a god to be appeased.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Such impossible questions are essential to Great Circle and build to a central preoccupation: “What is the magnitude of one life? And what is the scale of one life versus the scale of this planet we live on? How much can you pack into a life, and what do you choose to make your life about?” Shipstead says, “It’s all of these questions.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“We is safer than I when you’re inside it, but it’s a tippy thing, unreliable, ready at any moment to toss you away and leave you exposed as an I after all.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Abandonment stings, even when it means freedom.

[Hadley Baxter]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What's past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

[Marian Graves]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“We must bend in the wind sometimes.... So much is beyond our control.

[Mrs. Fahey]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“In life, beginnings are not fixed but ambient. They are happening all the time, without us noticing.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“You don't just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle