Agatha of Little Neon Quotes

“For those forty-five minutes I surrendered to wonder. It was such a relief to give up the need to be sure about things.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“The sort of person you’d think about as you fell asleep, comforted to remember that in this world of bad luck and rising sea levels and impossible pain, at least, thank God, there was her.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“The little bell rang when we opened the door, as if to signal that the best part of any place is the door, and the best part of any door is the other side of it.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“What I liked about the abbess was that she never told anyone what they should have done. She wasn’t interested in blighting anyone with shame. She dealt in procedures and plans.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“There were times when I did not stop at Amen. I could make the Beatitudes go on and on. There was never enough time to list all the blessed. Blessed are my students, I said, and blessed be their friends; blessed are the quitters; blessed are the nervous; blessed are those who hide; blessed are the messy; blessed are the ones who say 'Oh, that's over my head'; blessed are the late bloomers, and blessed are the foolish; blessed are those who lisp; blessed are the birthday party clowns; blessed are the waitresses; blessed are the awkward; blessed are those who burn the roofs of their mouths because they cannot stand to wait; and blessed are the heartbroken, the ones who haven't arrived at the other side of their pain. Thank you very much. Amen, amen, amen.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“I felt useless, and pathetic, and I hated both these feelings, and then I hated myself for feeling them.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“But I was tired. I told Father Steve that I have looked at the world and found it wanting. The world has had women for such a long time, I said. I did not know how to be patient anymore.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“What work it must be, to have a daughter. My own mother, I remembered as guarded, anxious, easily distracted. I didn’t want to become her. I wanted to be, as a teacher, and as a woman, some version of Mother Roberta: attentive, wise, beloved. But tough, too, the way she was—full of conviction. The sort of person you’d think about as you fell asleep, comforted to remember that in this world of bad luck and rising sea levels and impossible pain, at least, thank God, there was her.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“My brother was twelve and learning algebra; I was nineteen and learning how to look people in the eye. I was learning other things, too: how to distinguish packs of cigarettes by color, the names of the blacks and yellows and reds. I was memorizing the refrain of every pop song on the radio. But mostly I was learning that the only way for the night to end is for the night to end. There was no way to speed up a lonely hour.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“No one could understand why I hated talking, why it was so much work to come up with something to say. It was even more work to make it true or funny or smart. And then when you’d come up with it, you had to say it, and live with having said it.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“It's my belief that many men sleep too soundly at night.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“Oh, the Bible is full of freaks,' Therese said. She listed them on her fingers. 'At some point there's a talking donkey. And Joseph's got that crazy coat. And who's weirder than Jesus? The guy could walk on water.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“But here is something I know now, something I did not have the words for back then: straight is a myth. Any seemingly curveless length of graphite or ink will, upon closer inspection, reveal itself to be uneven. Think of any line from your childhood, I should have told the girls: the thick red stripe on the gymnasium floor, the skinny blue lines on a sheet of loose-leaf. Draw a line between the events of your life. Look at any of these up close, and you’ll see what I mean. On earth, a line is just a bunch of bumps. There’s no such thing as straight.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“Now I think it had something to do with love. The church she loved had never become what she wanted; the church she’d loved all her life was reluctant to change. She had no interest in controlling her temper because she had no idea how to control her love.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“I never liked Thanksgiving. The colonialism, for one. The sad fact of the turkey skeleton sitting on the counter after the meal. There were always so many dishes to wash, and dry, and put away. Mary Lucille would get indigestion and pass gas in her sleep. I ended up so tired each year.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“There is no time for nothing,” I told them, and passed it off as if it was my own invention, as if it was something I said all the time. This was part of the way Mother Roberta had loved us: she had taught us everything and never asked for credit.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“I’m still not sure what scared me more as I stood and looked into the dark with little wheels on my feet: staying there, or not staying there. But the night looked lovely and wild and immense, and so I lunged headlong onto the driveway before I could talk myself out of it.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“was impossible for me to tell just from looking, as we walked to the bus depot, whether the others were, like me, afraid to leave, or if they were so somber with a sense of obligation that they never let themselves feel dread. Perhaps they were determined to love whatever awaited us and expected nothing else. I watched them walk ahead, their heads bent low, habits fluttering, and couldn’t make up my mind how they felt. How wonderful it would be, to wring yourself of questions.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon

“When I was young, I thought womanhood would bring autonomy. Glamour. Fur coats and fat wallets. Days entirely of my design. I planned, as a girl, to become the kind of woman who kept a pen in her breast pocket; it seemed important that when I grew up I always had my own pen, that I never had to borrow anything from anyone else. Now that I’m on my own, the thing I miss most is time spent in a parked van with my sisters, waiting for one of us to root through her bag and find whatever it was the other needed the most.”
― Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon