Mamie's Fellowship of the Read

"It is a tradition in the pueblo to bury the baby's plancenta in the dirt floor of the house. It means you will always come back. For most of us it is a root into a place, but for my father I think it is a chain."

"But in here, we have no trail to follow and no one is finding us. So how do we keep going? In the morning, my mother makes the fire from nothing, only by blowing on the gray ash. You can't see it from the outside, but the fire is in there waiting for someone to notice, waiting for some reason to burn again. Waiting - en español "to wait" is the same as "to hope" - esperar. Besides chingar, esperar is the other official verb of Mexico, and it is what I do for you all this time - all these hours and days and words."

"Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.....Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing'. A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days....We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."

"I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself."

"McCrabben was a big, lanky man with a carefully engineered old-school peeler look tache, straight ginger hair and pale, bluish skin. With a tan he'd look somewhat like a Duracell battery, but he wasn't the type to get a tan. He was from farmer stock and he had a down-to-earth conservative millenarian quality that I liked a lot. His Ballymena accent conjured (in my mind at least) Weber's stolid Protestant work ethic."

"His hair was mostly black but with a Sontagian grey mohawk up front. His blue-grey eyes were sunk deep in his head and the lines around his mouth were deeper still. He had a square Celtic face, which reminded me a bit of Fred Flintstone or Ian McKellen."

“They (parents) made you how they need you. They built you with all they know, and love—and so they can’t see what you’re not: all the gaps you feel leave you vulnerable. All the new possibilities only imagined by your generation, and nonexistent to theirs. They have done their best, with the technology they had to hand at the time—but now it’s up to you, small, brave future, to do your best with what you have.”

“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, 'Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here.' You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, 'More input! More input for Johnny 5!' as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing 'Slave to the Rhythm' - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.”

"Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.”

"Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.”

"'My goodness, you have been useful.' He looked at me. 'Do you think you would like me to ask your father if you could go on active service?'

My mouth went dry. I had never been someone who liked to be active, unless you could call running after the number nine bus active. The very suggestion of any kind of team sports was enough to make me report to Matron instantly."

"He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation."

"She held him at arms’ length, looked at the pipe still gripped in his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her full cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speckled bedroom eyes.

The man drowned."

"Anyone who puts on a crown, even if only as an experiment, will end up looking for a kingdom."

"He believed that emotions changed memories, that when you lost the emotion associated with a particular event, you lost an important part of the event. So he had to write down things that he thought were important or record them on his little recorder when the emotions that went with them were still strong."

"I stopped our Trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phoung, 'Go inside and find a table. I had better look after Pyle.' That was my first instinct - to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."