Zorrie Quotes

“Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the “fragile film of the present” felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“You could get whiplash trying to watch time go by.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“She had often thought of Anne Frank, who had stuffed her short life with so much wonder, while here she was, having been granted many more years, just going through the motions like she was a ten-penny wind-up doll.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“It occurred to her then that it was silence and not grief that connected them, that would keep them forever connected, the living and the dead—her, Noah, Opal, Harold, Janie, Marie, her parents, maybe the whole world, and that this was not such a bad thing,”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Still, it was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“As she began to doze, she wondered if when you rode in airplanes, love, even old impossible love, sent hearts tumbling end over end.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“She asked Janie what it was like to have a mother, and Janie leaned over and gave Zorrie a kiss on the top of her head and then turned her around and gave her a quick kick in her seat and told her that having a mother was those two things, and that if sometimes it was more of one than the other, it all balanced out in the end.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“As she read and reread the note scrawled in Janie’s riotously looping hand, she understood that she was holding one of those rare objects brought into being by a hope you didn’t know you still had.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“I’d like to be buried in a dirt mound,” Opal said. Zorrie bit her lower lip again. “They bury all kinds of things in there. That’s where you can find pottery and oyster shells. Child toys too, nice ones with jeweled beads. There are also quite a number of sundry charred articles, each wearing its own black coat. It would be warm and quiet in a dirt mound. You could lie there a long time. The snow could fall and cover the whole wide world and there you would lie.” “I like that,” said Zorrie. “ ‘Out of this sun, into this shadow,’ ” said Opal. “That’s pretty. Is that something you thought up?” “Well, Zorrie Underwood, that’s more or less by an author. You will not find it in the Bible. It’s not in any devotional. I used to like to say it the other way around, ‘Out of this shadow, into this sun,’ but that is not the way the author wrote it down. It’s harder the way she wrote it, but prettier and more true. Sometimes I get under my blanket and pretend that’s where I already am. Under the ground, I mean. I told Phoebe Nelson what I do sometimes, and now she does it all the time. Maybe now on Friday afternoons we can do it with your music.” “Wouldn’t that be too noisy?” “Oh, no, we would play it soft.” Zorrie looked over at the bed with the gray blanket and imagined what it would be like to have warm dirt piled on top of her. No coffin, just dirt. Warm and soft. The King crooning quietly while she melted away. “I had a friend they put into a coffin not too long ago. But it was a nice one, I’m told. All fresh and white. I’ve got another friend who might be going there soon,” Zorrie said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” “They were ghost girls. Over in Ottawa, Illinois. I guess I was one for a while too.” “Ghost girls, Zorrie Underwood?” “Because after work we would glow in dark places like movie theaters.” “Or like in my cave!” “Yes, just like that.” “Why, that’s a beautiful thing.” “Yes, it was. While it lasted. For a short while. A long time ago.” “Don’t you glow anymore?” “Not in many a year.” “Maybe I’m a ghost girl, then, too.” “Maybe you are.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Hard to say,” Hank said. “I’ve never known a son who admired his father more, that’s the truth. But the truth there gets shipwrecked on the shores of their old family complaints. I know that remains the case. That Opal he lost is still more or less the blood beating through his veins.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“If the ache of Harold’s absence descended on her during the quiet months, she would take a rag to it with her mind and rub. Over the years, this approach so drastically diminished the frequency with which Zorrie thought of Harold that she eventually worried there might be some fault in it, especially because now when he was mentioned by one of her neighbors or she chanced upon an undiscovered fishing lure or belt buckle she hadn’t yet learned how not to notice, the burn that had always hit her at the back of the chest was gone. This lack of any painful reaction—a lack she had so longed for—struck her, now that it had arrived, as too complete. It made her feel she had taken it all too far. You came to terms with things, but not by carrying them out to the field and burying them under the beans. Mr. Thomas had long ago told her class that “the encumbering elements of our histories must be spoken aloud, at least in the caverns of our brains, if we wish for them to take up wings.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“The crisply chiseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for came to seem complicit in the agonized unfolding of her grief, so that soon the farm and the surrounding fields and the endless ark of change that enclosed them were the only timepiece whose hour strokes she could abide.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips at the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“That evening, after a small supper of tomato soup, celery, and crackers, Zorrie sat with Oats and wondered if the feeling, such as it was, was something that took more easily in the young and the old, and that the average person in the middle had to fly some of her years with just the wings of old habit to keep her from crashing. Looking at it this way, she saw the feeling as something that had grown cool but not cold, that there was a center to it that could get encouraged to life again. This encouragement, it seemed to her, ought though to come directly from upstairs and not from other people, and it bothered her that she had brought it up to Noah, that he might think she was after him about it. Maybe there was some feeling in him somewhere and maybe there wasn’t, but it wasn’t up to her or anyone else to go poking for it and applying bellows in any place but themselves.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“He had gone to see Opal once, soon after she had been taken, and his arrival and request for admittance had so upset her that he had promised to abide by her doctor’s advice and the restrictions her family had put in place and wait to return. Somehow he was waiting still. Time wasn’t doing what he had thought it would, what he thought, in truth, it had promised to. He smiled”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“He thought that there was plenty out there, and allowed that maybe some of it was even eternal, but he wasn’t sure any of it needed a name and so many little houses built on its behalf in the countryside out of wood and stone.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“He thought that there was plenty out there, and allowed that maybe some of it was even
eternal, but he wasn’t sure any of it needed a name and so many little houses built on its behalf in the countryside out of wood and stone”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“prepared for them. He would talk as they washed and dried and put the dishes away. He would talk and then not talk as they lay, later, for hours entire entwined. Zorrie slept in sweet, shallow bursts. Some nights, when she woke or couldn’t sleep, the walls fell away and the coming day unfurled before her. Lying there listening to the crickets, she could feel the corn against her waist and wrists, the tangled beans against her ankles. The wet”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Life, Virgil had said, was a good deal about discouragement and fear, and the soul, which was the true heart of humankind whether you looked at it Christian or otherwise, needed a good deal of comforting some way or other if it was expected to soldier on.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Janie said she thought you’d make it through. That you’d keep finding things worth finding.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the “fragile film of the present” felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried. She wondered if Noah had”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the ‘fragile film of the present’ felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips and the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie