Ericka Waller > Quotes

“She says nothing, but everything has changed, and when she goes up to bed later that night, after staying behind to tidy up, she finds all the bracelets she helped the women make lying on her bed with tags that say, ‘For you, Lizzie’. They are all blue, for protection. They were listening to her after all.”
― Ericka Waller, Dog Days: A big-hearted, tender, funny novel about new beginnings

“Behind each door, cardboard people are sleeping, unaware of how fragile their lives are,”
― Ericka Waller, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

“Once upon a time, time used to fly. She and Arthur were forever late to train stations and appointments, chasing clocks like a runaway tissue on the breeze, Birdie’s skirt flapping as they ran. ‘Where did it go?’ they used to say to one another. When Arthur and Rose left, time changed. Birdie has sat through never-ending nights. Days that forgot to draw in. Suns that refused to set and midnights that lingered. Time is all Birdie has had for so long, her hands are sticky with it. Hours and years are clogged up under her wedding band. A whole decade under her thumbnail.”
― Ericka Waller, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

“If love could be bottled, if the strength to do for others what they cannot do for themselves could be plucked and pickled and tapped into veins, maybe no one would die of cancer. Maybe Ada could have kept her child, with her mother’s devotion fuelling her. But, like her patients, it was her body. It was her choice. It will always be her choice.”
― Ericka Waller, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

“Get up, Min,’ Birdie says. ‘Your daughters need you. All you have is a case of the lonelies. I know it well, believe me. It’s a pig of a virus, but it won’t kill you. You’ve just had too much time on your own. Too much time to think. Nothing ages you like heartache.”
― Ericka Waller, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

“And if hopes and wishes were loaves and fishes, we’d all swim in riches,’ her mother used to say.”
― Ericka Waller, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

“What do you do when your life has been given an expiry date?”
― Ericka Waller, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

“Dan knew from a young age that he was always going to struggle not to tidy up the world. He always wanted to tell strangers if their coat was buttoned up wrongly, or if their scarf didn’t lie just so, but his shyness stopped him. So it made him anxious instead.”
― Ericka Waller, Dog Days: A big-hearted, tender, funny novel about new beginnings

“Lizzie had once read a memoir by a survivor of Jonestown...It seemed too unbelievable but, then, Margaret Atwood hadn't included any scenario in The Handmaid's Tale that hadn't already occurred in some time or place.”
― Ericka Waller, Dog Days