Best 67 quotes of Laura Kasischke on MyQuotes

No one is going to hear what she says whether she speaks or not. Simply she could close her eyes and never speak again. She could suck all of the air in this room-every dust mote, every atom-into her body and hide it inside her.

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man.

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

A knife plunged into the center of summer. Air and terror, which become teeth together.

A man holding a woman made of bad moods in his arms.

A man in the massive shadows of the columns of the Museum of Griefs-to-Come.

And all the embezzled cents and dollars of the last time I saw you.

and a table in a kitchen at which the nightingales feasted on fairy tales, the angels stuffed themselves with fog

And, for the first few months after her surgeries, Holly had felt, horribly, as if she'd been turned into a machine, an unkillable robot. She had terrible dreams in which she was searching for her body parts on shelves lined with thousands of other body parts, floating in thousands of jars. In the dreams, Holly was convinced that her soul had been located in one of those body parts, and now her soul was trapped for eternity in formaldehyde and glass.

And I still walk the sidewalk mumbling something about how it will all be fine Fine is its own crazy village on the Rhine Fine is the name of the cuckoo-clock maker Fine is the word the cuckoo cries every hour after hour on the hour— scrambling out of its dark little hole like something being chased with a knife by Time

And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored gently in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July.

And the box inside him in which his mother resides is velvet and black and without size.

and the stones, bewitched, can see: The lost hours and into the past.

And this last second or two of dreaming in which your face returns to me completely. Not even needing to be, being so alive again to me.

And this letter I didn't send how surprising to find it now. All this love I must have felt.

An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident- opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall- the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the grounder in small, cold shards. It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived.

as if we were actual human beings or completely normal people

Being female was so hard. Always having to rearrange yourself, to pluck yourself and whittle yourself and deprive yourself and inspect yourself in order to feel comfortable in this world.

Believable, chronological, but so quickly erased that it only serves to prove that the universe is made of curving, warping space.

But, perhaps, I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air- looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged. I could smell the death between them.

Even my identity has been kept hidden from me. It is a child's ghost buried in mud. It is an old woman waving at me from a passing train.

Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.

Hidden in the works of a mysterious clock are her many deaths, and yet the whole world is piled up before her on a banquet table again today. The timer, broken.

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon- pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance- and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone.

I am the impossibility of desiring the person you pity. And the petal of the Easter lily—

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you'd crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.

I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I'd never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them- something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light, and it was thought I could hold the life force itself in my hands.

I, who am doubt now, with a song.

She is ancientness. She has lived forever. It has driven her insane.

It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond, and a tiny goldfish swimming like an animated change-purse made of brightness and surprises observing the moment through its empty eye.

To live. I'm not endorsing it.

It's impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

Its sweet bird's nest is full of pain in a distant place

I was there, where the pale words, like light on a wave. Where the forgotten music was still played. The lovers, gone. Their beds unmade.

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free.

Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women.

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.

Maybe, I think, when you've waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

My eyes closed, hands open, Take it, take it. Then, every day wasted chasing it.

My memory of your casual smile This memory, like a child's bit of sweet embroidery smuggled out of an asylum

My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees.

Not the bureaucrat's stamp on the folder of our fate. But a knot nonetheless, and not of our making.

She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space- all meteors, no atmosphere.

Something wild was going on in that coffin….I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the very air around us bound by chains.

That to want to succeed is to fail

The aunts gathered around the fiery cake chanting, Make a wish! Make a wish!

The day en route to darkness. The guillotine on the way to the neck.

The heart hacked out of the center of an overgrown hedge with an ax To live beyond the brain