Laura Kasischke > Quotes

“Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren't accompanied by regret.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Raising

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke

“your life can change in an instant. that instant can last forever.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“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…”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“We can talk to one another on telephones
in banks, in cars, in line. No more
sitting on the floor
attached to a cord
while everybody listens.
No more
standing outside the booth
in the cold, fingering
an adulterous dime. We

send each other mail without stamps.
Watch television without antennas.
Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never
on a bus, never
in the lobby while we’re waiting
for the lawyer to call on us.

Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon.
Quaintly the record album’s scratch and spin.
Our groceries, scanned.
Pump our own gas.
Take off our shoes
before boarding our plane.
Those towers: Gone. And Pluto’s
no longer a planet:
Forget it.
I could go on

and on, but you’re still dead
and nothing’s any different.”
― Laura Kasischke

“The first shot causes warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain…a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“Scratch the surface, and there’s just more surface—chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard: A Novel

“...but I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him...It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper-"You will inherit a million dollars," "You will go on an exotic vacation"-but never moving, standing in one place while the damp batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard: A Novel

“July, that lovely hell, all
velvet dresses and drapes
stuffed into a hot little hole.”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

“She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily. The hall light shone in my eyes. There was a halo in her hair. It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard: A Novel

“Behind him there's still the mirror…a bit of infinity, which in its disinterest still holds their reflections safely in it.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard

“There's April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is... friendship. There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does, love.”
― Laura Kasischke

“The first time I had sex with a man for money, it was September.”
― Laura Kasischke, Suspicious River

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke, Mind of Winter

“A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard: A Novel

“Home"

It would take forever to get there
but I would know it anywhere:

My white horse grazing in my blossomy field.
Its soft nostrils. The petals
falling from the trees into the stream.

The festival would be about to begin
in the dusky village in the distance. The doe
frozen at the edge of the grove:

She leaps. She vanishes. My face—
She has taken it. And my name—

(Although the plaintive lark in the tall
grass continues to say and to say it.)

Yes. This is the place.
Where my shining treasure has been waiting.
Where my shadow washes itself in my fountain.

A few graves among the roses. Some moss
on those. An ancient

bell in a steeple down the road
making no sound at all
as the monk pulls and pulls on the rope.”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

“And

this letter
I didn't send
how surprising

to find it now.

All this love I must have felt.”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard

“But the future bores me.
I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.
I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard

“When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

“Mr. McCleod: And if there’s anything I want you guys to take with you from this class, as you’re abusing your bodies over break, is three things: the heart is the body’s strongest muscle, that the brain has more cells in it than our galaxy has stars, and that the body is 72% water. So wherever you go over vacation, don’t get too dehydrated.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“Bright splash of blood on the kitchen
floor. Astonishing
red. (All
that brightness inside me?)”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

“It was summer. My afternoons
were made of time and vinyl.”
― Laura Kasischke, Dance and Disappear

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard: A Novel

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard

“The blond stuffs her hairbrush, which is now spun with gold and black silk (a miniature angel's nest) back into her backpack next to her anthology of English literature. The pages are so thin, they're like dead girls' dreams, translucent skin. On them it seems that everything that has ever been thought has been written.”
― Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

“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.”
― Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard

“The heart hacked out of the center of an overgrown hedge with an ax
To live beyond the brain”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains