The Long Form Quotes

“I know time. I know time differently now. I know it because I am unlearning it. I know it because the baby is teaching me that the rhythms of the clock and the calendar, and even the most elemental diurnal patterns – they don’t go without saying: they are acquired, if not violently imposed. It is a lived and not an abstract form of knowledge that comes from living alongside a beginner – the way the days can all of a sudden feel like they're undivided, divided by nothing, only water.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“A novel is interested in how one thing follows another; it is equally (arguably more) interested in what it feels like to live in time; in life lived by intensity. As a treatment of time, a novel activates not only curiosity in the reader (And then?) but memory: a form of attention that is accumulative as well as anticipatory, backward-reaching as well as forward-facing and itself capable of acting on time. That is, of repeating or extending the strategies of the narration. By skipping a bit of it. Or staying with it. Thickening it by reading a passage again.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“The world is surprising. It had undiscovered stores. It is not yet wholly given. There will be new gestures, new questions, new forms of life. The capacity to welcome them, to make room for them (to accommodate without crushing them), to learn from and be transformed by them depends on the provision of this “quiet yet live holding”---in this form. Then in all its further expected and unexpected, tested, and as yet unimagined forms.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“For what if it were easier to love a pattern when you were a pattern yourself? When social life required that you fall into its established patterns, starting with the basic division of day and night?

What if it were much harder to love what is irregular, interruptive, scattered, and uncontained?”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“Once more, she adjusted her sense of the morning. It was remarkable to her – exhilarating and exhausting – how many times this could happen: how many adjustments a person could make, mining deep for a new seam of resources, despairing, altogether, of their existence, then finding them unexpectedly in the air, like the moon unsought at lunchtime.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“The novel, by working with the interplay of durations, and inviting the reader to interact with them, has the capacity to pay a double, triple, multiple allegiance to the weird workings of time, to our common sense idea of its ongoing sequence as well as to what living-in-time can actually feel like, filling it and distorting it.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“Some moments, hours, days, last longer for some people than others, depending. Daily life, whatever it may be really, is practically composed of two lives, said Forster: the life in time, ticking, marching by, regular, implacable, and the life by values, slowing or accelerating, shrinking or expanding, condensing or prolonging. The same sixty-second spans experienced as short minutes, as elongated minutes (as thin minutes or thicker minutes). As separated minutes: distinctive pockets, or stand-out portions of detached, delimited time.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form