26 Quotes & Sayings By Elizabeth Mccracken

Elizabeth McCracken was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1979. She received a BA from the University of California in Berkeley in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2006. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Book Review, Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Ploughshares, Ragazine, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at New York University and is a contributing writer for Tablet Magazine.

1
Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine. Elizabeth McCracken
Books remember all the things you cannot contain.
2
Books remember all the things you cannot contain. Elizabeth McCracken
The idea of a library full of books, the books...
3
The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. Elizabeth McCracken
4
Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room. Elizabeth McCracken
5
Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others. Elizabeth McCracken
Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant...
6
Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary. Elizabeth McCracken
7
Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours. Elizabeth McCracken
8
I’m so sorry, ” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention — as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name. Elizabeth McCracken
9
All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins. Elizabeth McCracken
10
Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving. Elizabeth McCracken
11
Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better. . Elizabeth McCracken
12
Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, and then you spend your life filling it up. You're the only one who understands the filing system, you amass some clutter, sure, but somehow it works: you're asked the capital of Oregon, and you say Salem; you want to remember your first-grade teacher's name, and there it is, Miss Fox. Then suddenly you're old, and though everything's still in your brain, it's crammed so tight that when you try to remember the name of the guy who does the upkeep on your lawn, your first childhood crush comes fluttering out, or the persistent smell of tomato soup in a certain Des Moines neighborhood. . Elizabeth McCracken
13
My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong. Elizabeth McCracken
14
When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange. I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else's; surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now - now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don't want to say it aloud. People don't like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card. Elizabeth McCracken
15
Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did. Elizabeth McCracken
16
Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium. Elizabeth McCracken
17
Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. Elizabeth McCracken
18
You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.' Elizabeth McCracken
19
Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. Elizabeth McCracken
20
There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. Elizabeth McCracken
21
For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. Elizabeth McCracken
22
I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. Elizabeth McCracken
23
It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. Elizabeth McCracken
24
There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.' Elizabeth McCracken
25
When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. Elizabeth McCracken