Michael Christie > Quotes

“What if a family isn't a tree at all? What if it's more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought... what are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason. And like all stories, families are not born, they're invented. Pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“There aren't any normal lives, son. That's the lie that hurts us most.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light, then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he’s built, and there is something to that. It’s not enough, but it’s what he’ll take with him.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“...why is it, she wonders...that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today?”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them? If only we were like trees...If only we had centuries. Maybe then there'd be time enough for us to mend all the harm we have done.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“How intimately a book is related to the tree and it’s rings, she thinks. The layers of time, preserved, for all to examine.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Still, Temple has no illusions concerning her library's impact. Her books won't lift anyone from their low station. They won't right wrongs or save wandering souls from perdition or fill grumbling stomachs. But they might let a few scraps of sunlight fall into some lean, desolate lives. And that's something.

'The Greatest Library of Estevan, Saskatchewan”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“If it's true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary justice...then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip our the Earth's most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheaply to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again--that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Maybe trees do have souls. Which makes wood a kind of flesh. And perhaps instruments of wooden construction sound so pleasing to our ears for this reason: the choral shimmer of a guitar; the heartbeat thump of drums; the mournful wail of violins--we love them because they sound like us.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“The Outside had taught him that there wasn't much difference between loving someone and being afraid for them. Loving a person meant need them to stay: alive, around. But the shadow that love can't help cast is fear: fear that they won't stay alive or around - fear they'll be reckless, or doomed, or just walk away and not consider you ever again. With love, you're scared it will disappear. With fear, you're scared it never will. The trick, Will understood now but would never quite manage to put into practice, was getting used to both of them at the same time. It was living in between.”
― Michael Christie, If I Fall, If I Die

“Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors...Jake has gained a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that come before her own. And by a series of crimes and miracles, accidents and choices, sacrifices and mistakes, all of which have landed her in this particular body and delivered her to this day.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“A person seldom knows they're starved for something until they get a taste of it.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“This is the carpenter's painful truth: nothing is true.

...We think we live in boxes until we look closer and find we're in fact living in irregular shapes, in big, misshapen accidents.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“The old saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But in Willow's experience, the opposite is more likely true. An apple is nothing but a seed's escape vehicle, just one of the ingenious ways they hitch rides -- in the bellies of animals, or by taking to the wind -- all to get as far away from their parents as they possibly can. So is it any wonder the daughters of dentists open candy stores, the sons of accountants become gambling addicts, the children of couch potatoes run marathons? She's always believed that most people's lives are lived as one great refutation of the ones that came before them.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“It's not a prison if you've built it yourself... It's a fortress.”
― Michael Christie, If I Fall, If I Die

“So know this: your father loved you with everything he had. He just didn't have much left.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Because there’s nothing like poverty to teach you just how much of a luxury integrity truly is.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“I do not want you because you are mine. I want you because I am yours.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Being brave is never easy. That’s why it’s good for you.”
― Michael Christie, If I Fall, If I Die

“Whenever she tells the story of the cyclone...she will puzzle over how to properly describe the sound it made as it ate through her library. She'll grapple with how one could possibly capture precisely the sound of ten thousand books drawn up into the air and scattered for hundreds of miles. And it won't be until years later--long after the Depression ends and poor people stop riding the rails...and long after she's able to again venture into that section of her field where they planted the windbreak of maples together, trees that have only thrived ever since. And long after the void he left in her life entirely heals over--only then will she arrive at a suitable answer: they sounded like birds.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Jake leaves unmentioned the fact that she'd long ago filed motherhood away in the locked cupboard that contains everything that the Withering has made impossible for people like her: her own home, a steady relationship, a research lab, a tenured teaching position. And even if she did have the money, why would anyone willingly bring a child into such a fallen, desolate world? Children require hope and prosperity as trees require light and water, and Jake Greenwood is all tapped out of both.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“The boy stepped Outside, and he did not die.”
― Michael Christie, If I Fall, If I Die

“Lomax reminds me of a tree that's been sawn right through and still won't fall. And while I'm more a sailor than a lumberman, I did my time in your camps, and one thing I learned there is that a tree that's been cut through and still won't drop is one of the most dangerous things there is.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Being brave is never easy. That's why it's good for you.”
― Michael Christie, If I Fall, If I Die

“What is raising a child except lying? It begins with the first shhhh...everything is going to be...and only gets worse from there.”
― Michael Christie, If I Fall, If I Die

“How, Willow wondered, could anyone possibly believe in old-fashioned political change in an era like this?An era when the president of the United States is a lying ghoul, the rain melts your skin, the food is laced with poison, wars are eternal, and the world's oldest living beings are being felled to make Popsicle sticks. "This whole sick system is in its death throes, Harris. And in my opinion, those holding the levers of power ought to be the first to get dragged down with it." P82”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“...Liam Greenwood has often thought that people like clear wood best because they need to see time stacked together. Years pressed against years, all orderly and clean. Free from obstruction or blemish. The way our own lives never are.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Preachers and politicians often contend that hardship knits us together. That some great calamity like the Crash brings out the best and most noble in us. Yet in his long, tortured, and grasping life, Harvey Bennett Lomax will have witnessed only the opposite. In his experience, the harder things get, the worse we treat one another. And the worst things we’ll ever do, we save for our families.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood