Timothy Schaffert > Quotes

“We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“You were young, I thought, not once but always before, always always, every day before the day just passed. You were young only minutes ago.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty." (127”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Desiree the child bride, and her sister Miranda, had gone grave-robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who’d been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery’s most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule’s, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom’s jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk.”
― Timothy Schaffert, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“Kindness to your family costs you almost nothing but affords a wealth of goodwill.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola

“A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don't dance, they don't sway. That's not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God's love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself." (48)”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“But they simply didn't know Sammy in the late hours, all his virulent bedtime prayers whispered away into his folded hands, releasing his worry and anxiety over the sinful so he could sleep well and fight the devil again in the daylight. And, easefully and kindly, he'd hold Abby in his arms, becoming just as lost as everyone else, just as blind in the dark.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“He took from his coat pocket a handful of wadded-up cash, as if children had paid him directly with their sweaty clutches of dollar bills.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“After we ate our heaping slice of humble pie, we asked the missus if she could at least serve it up a la mode next time.”
― Timothy Schaffert

“They need to connect with the earth, to tether themselves to this place they so want to leave, because they need someplace like home.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola

“I like to imagine the war will end soon, and people who've lost their homes will return to Paris, to stroll through Greenspoon's. This one, they'll say, touching the black scar on the piano lid from where an uncle rested his cigarette that day, when he sat down to accompany the girls' singing. And this one, they'll say, knowing a china horse by the chip in its hoof. They'll know a silver teapot by a dent in its spout. A fur coat by a rip in its lining. A wristwatch by a scratch in its glass. A doll by its torn dress. They'll be newly grateful for all the old flaws, for the damage that left these precious things overlooked and unbought and distinctly their own.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Perfume Thief

“I would happily spend every minute of my future hearing about every minute of his past.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Titanic Survivors Book Club

“There's nothing more fierce than an Omaha nun. They've got shotguns tucked away in those habits. In a frontier town, you can't fend off evil with a crucifix.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola

“naive. Childish. From then on, butterflies mocked me. I didn’t thieve a single thing in my travels with the lepidopterist, though I made myself useful by negotiating with guides and hoteliers on the prices of donkeys and hammocks. I typed reports on typewriters that weighed half a ton, in Ceylon, in Singapore, in Trinidad. And”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Perfume Thief

“olfactory club,” an international cabal of sensualists.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Perfume Thief

“you should've fought to be at her side. People like you and me, we gotta fight tooth and nail, cradle to grave.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola

“Every day I carry the weight of your absence”
The Perfume Thief”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Perfume Thief

“Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Ivy had not been a junkie or a drunk-she’d been too uncommitted to anything to be an addict of any kind.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“...people feel they can be revealing around me, that they can unbutton their lips and let slip intimate facts ad trust that I have the maturity to keep my mouth shut.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Well, we could start a book society. We'll all want to meet again, but what will we talk about? How fortunate we are? How guilty? Meet again and again to talk on and on about how we don't have any words for how we feel? But if we have a book to discuss, we can talk about everything that's on our minds without having to talk about ourselves at all.”
― Timothy Schaffert

“Sometimes the right scent is the one that seems all wrong. Sometimes a woman goes into a perfume shop seeking adaptation. Or metamorphosis. Or an outright lie.

if you can convince a client just a little bit, he'll convince himself the rest of the way. He wants so much to believe. Faith. It's vital in both thievery and perfume.

Perfume was the most exquisite fraud of all - a pretty little bottle of cheap fixings and alcohol that you sold for at least triple its worth.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Perfume Thief