The Souvenir Museum Quotes

“Some grackles might possess souls and some grackles might possess intelligence but it was impossible to believe that any one grackle possessed both: not enough room in their brilliantined heads. A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom. One grackle was missing a foot, and Thea blamed him for it. If they had been magpies, she might have counted them up, wondering what they foretold, but grackles were just seagulls in widows’ weeds. They weren’t omens of anything except more grackles.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn’t; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle. Maybe they don’t want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“Nearby was a box of thick seventy-eights, grackle black and grackle brilliant. Thea thought the cliff might come down. But the woman was goat-footed; she got to the top and came back down and handed over the doll.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“You,” she might have said to a particular grackle. “Georgia. Is it?”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“You could think a grackle was somebody you’d lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I’m a bird, but I could fuck you up.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum