Rivka Galchen > Quotes

“We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in – a way to signal those lies that could be more accurately described as dreams. Lies – they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.”
― Rivka Galchen

“I’m interested in [meteorology], but I’m more interested in gross misappropriations of the authoritative language of science. It feels rife with clarity, and yet you don’t understand what it means. And I think that’s beautiful.”
― Rivka Galchen

“You can’t discover what’s true based on how many people think it’s true.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“I’d consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give to the world than that? I realize this sentiment of mine is currently considered appalling, but these days I find the popularity of ideas even more meaningless than ever before.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“That's what life is: a bunch of thorns, and a berry.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.”
― Rivka Galchen, Little Labors

“Though my initial progress did not look or feel like progress, I believe it was a kind of progress, that of just staying in place, of not slipping backward into despair.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“I try my best to like people. To expect good from them. If you see someone as a monster, it is as good as attaching a real horn to them and poking them with a hot metal poker.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“I also felt that I had failed Hans in failing to save his child. Poor Susanna, in that house with me, but really alone. She mended every garment in the home, even those of the children. LittleHammer survived. But she had become cold and aloof. I understood her—to love others is to suffer.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“The strawberry sets its seeds on the outside, for all to see. A strawberry has nothing to hide.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“I had considered envying men before -- I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania -- but I don't really envy those things, and I'm not sure I even believe in them -- but this, the covert-baby-having thing, was the first real thing.”
― Rivka Galchen, Little Labors

“He saw delphinium as I saw delphinium. As a plant capable of good and evil both. As a plant that required the knowledge and good intentions of man.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She'd said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they hadn't committed.
(From the short story: Once an Empire)”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“Memento mori--remember that you must die--is a worthy and necessary message for ordinary times when you might forget. Memento vivere--remember that you must live--is the message of "The Decameron.”
― Rivka Galchen, The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic

“Books for young children rarely feature children. They feature animals, or monsters, or, occasionally, children behaving like animals or monsters. Books for adults almost invariably feature adults.”
― Rivka Galchen, Little Labors

“You'll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you'll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a life jacket in a train wreck.”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“I was certain she would recover. She had so much strength in her, and spirit. I started making some pickles; I was thinking that many months ahead. The cucumbers were so green and compelling, and I carefully cut away bruises. But Maruschl was gone before the next Tuesday. The baby Katharina died as well within the month. To hear Susanna weeping in an unspeakable misery saying, My baby, my baby, was worse than my own losses. I was willing to give everything and anything to bring the children back. As we waited for Hans to return, there was a part of me that held out the hope that when he returned, so they would too. I dreamed of walking hand in hand with Maruschl. I dreamed even of us arguing, of her growing angry with me, or disappointed, I wanted that for her much more than I wanted to live.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“When Maruschl was near me, I felt as if I were wearing an emerald; at times I was anxious that my good fortune was so visible outside of the home.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.”
― Rivka Galchen

“I’ve never understood the complexities of church thinking. They should leave the details to God.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“I have work to do, I have other obligations, whereas they—this is their work. They’re the guild of rumormongers. The society of theft-by-accusation. People are stupid, sure, they’re ignorant, yes, they’re greedy, okay—but these people are fine with basically murdering her if it suits them.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“I don’t know if math is real in the sense that it’s woven into the fabric of the cosmos, or if it’s something that we invent and impose upon it. I don’t know.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“I also now have no interest in close observation of the world as it is around me.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“The room was too much there. I could feel the color of the wallpaper -- burgundy -- invading.”
― Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

“There are two things a woman must do alone: she does her own believing and her own dying.”
― Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch