Carol Anshaw > Quotes

“Romance no longer looked like so much fun, more like a repetitive stress injury…”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“...religions all have the same timeline...First the people feel the need to worship something. The sun or the giant corn of ear. That's the first thing. Then the guys say okay, now that we've got the giant corn thing going, how can we use it to oppress women?”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“But they were not friends. They were here to keep each other from spinning off alone into the dark matter of the universe.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“You are a speck. This whole life that seems so huge to us? asall of human enterprise even? Fuck us. We are so tiny," as he said "so tiny" he bent over until his forehead was nearly touching the tabletop, as if he was homing in on the speck that was them. "I can't stand to think we only add up to a blip. I need to think we're more than that." "Deal with it." he looked around as if someone had called his name.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“He swam against the hard current of the class bores - there were three - who could relate every incident in the book to something in their own lives.”
― Carol Anshaw

“She shared the curse of many artists—that praise beaded up and rolled off her while criticism stuck like glue, glue embedded with ground glass.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“Because of her hospital schedule, she was either not around at all, or sleeping, or around a lot.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“She looked around the table and saw each of them as they looked that night...All of them in their last hours of making mistakes with small prices.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“She pitied everyone who didn't have a sister.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“I want you to know I haven't put this behind me. That night sits inside me as if it were yesterday. Time passing doesn't touch it.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“She had probably been too intense, always trying to shake sense into whomever, then bewildered when, instead of revising their beliefs or being galvanized into action, they simply chose to be friends with someone else.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“This was Maude's legacy; she left Alice with her heart weakened, its chambers bruised. She was no longer up to the enthusiasm required by love.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“She tried to stare hard past all this, down the road to the patch where this would end badly. But the view was obscured by hope and distance, and by the mist that always lies over the new.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“But for the most part, she was the Maude who Alice would have said she wanted all along. But instead of seeming more reasonable, practical, or grown up, this perfected version of Maude seemed smaller, diminished by her easy acceptance of reduced circumstances.”
― Carol Anshaw

“She had never met anyone who was more of a sure thing, sure to stay put in her life now that he’d walked through its door. Now she could unhook her hopes from lost love. Now she didn’t have to go looking for a future.”
― Carol Anshaw, Aquamarine: A Novel

“Whatever element causes romance to flare was simply not present in the air between them. This was a huge relief to Alice. Romance no longer looked like so much fun, more like a repetitive stress injury...”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“This was how he saw himself: balancing on the event horizon, trying not to get sucked into the black hole, trying to hang on to the light.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“They were ants saying, "Hey can we help you hold up this huge building that's toppling onto you?”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“She knew that when somebody told you these sorts of things, they were pebbles cast into the pool and you ought to look carefully at the ripples of implication.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“Storming was one of her main modes of transportation." In reference to teenager Heather in "Carry The One”
― Carol Anshaw

“She pitied everyone who didn’t have a sister.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“She was in firm solidarity with the oppressed and downtrodden.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One

“Sober, he had to keep busy and purposeful, always moving. If he stopped, he immediately heard the sandstorm inside himself, and it terrified him.”
― Carol Anshaw, Carry the One