Pat Murphy > Quotes

“If you can’t change the world with chocolate chip cookies, how can you change the world?”
― Pat Murphy

“I read books when I was a kid, lots of books. Books always seemed like magic to me. They took you to the most amazing places. When I got older, I realized I couldn’t find books that took me to all the places I wanted to go. To go to those places, I had to write some books myself.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“I've learned to write the truth. But to do that, I had to figure out what the truth was-and I had to realize that the truth isn't always the same for everyone. I had to realize that my truth may not be the same as your truth.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“Sometimes, you gotta believe something crazy. Because all the other things you could believe hurt too much.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“The men in the nearby village fear us, thinking we are witches. Women who live without men—especially old women who grow herbs, heal the sick, and befriend wild animals—are always suspect.”
― Pat Murphy, Black Swan, White Raven

“Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“You are afraid of us. You are afraid because you don't know what we might do.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“You do it for yourself, not for anyone else. When you make something beautiful, you change. You put something of yourself into the thing you make. You’re a different person when you’re done.”
― Pat Murphy, The City, Not Long After

“What do you do when you are falling? Do you reach out and try to grab for support? If you aren’t careful, you will pull others down with you. Unless you are very careful.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“I thought it was a really good story,' Cindy said. She was trying to make me feel better, I think. 'I liked the way it ended. When I was halfway through, I was thinking that maybe some handsome prince was going to show up and save the princess.'

'She didn't need a handsome prince,' I said. 'Those wild girls did just fine on their own.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“Popularity is not the mark of a properly rigorous academic work.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“Verla says that nobody thinks of himself as a villain. Even the nastiest person thinks that he is in the right.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“But when you write something down, you have to think it all the way through. Sometimes, I'm not even sure how I feel about something until I write a story about it. I figure it out while I'm writing the story.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“Do you know how to tell if a work is art?” he asked her calmly. “True art changes the artist. The artist puts something into the work and he changes. That’s how you tell.”
― Pat Murphy, The City, Not Long After

“JOIN THE CIRCUS OF CHAOS ... juggling, stilt walking, and other skills for socially acceptable procrastination.”
― Pat Murphy

“Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don’t like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can’t talk back. That’s not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We’re a slow-moving lot.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“If you don’t believe in ghosts, then I dare you to run around the old man’s grave. Three times. Counterclockwise.”

John thought about it. “If I run round it counterclockwise, that’ll bring bad luck,” he said. “I believe in bad luck.”

“Bones”
― Pat Murphy, Points of Departure

“All those square-jawed heroes of the old science fiction stories had it wrong. You can't save the world as we know it. I did what I could, and I did some good in the world. But you can't save the world without changing it.”
― Pat Murphy, Bridging Infinity

“We find the Mayan pantheon peculiar. By our standards, suicide and human sacrifice are unacceptable. We tend not to notice the peculiarities of our own culture. We accept the thousands of children who wear braces to correct their teeth, yet we consider the Maya odd for filing teeth to beautify them. Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“The people who have put their minds to translating the Mayan hieroglyphics have come to the conclusion that many of the symbols are puns and puzzles. ‘Xoc,’ for example, means ‘to count.’ It is also the name of a mythical fish that lives in the heavens. So the Maya used the head of the fish to represent counting. But since the fish was difficult to carve, they substituted the symbol for water, since that’s where fish live. The symbol for water is a jade bead, since both are green and precious. So jade means water means fish means to count.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“We talked about each story for a while, and then Verla talked about heroes and villains. 'Nobody is all good or all bad,' she told us. 'The world is painted in shades of gray.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“Somewhere at my center, with the madness I had locked away, I had sealed off the part of me that knew how to love. It was too close to the part of me that knew how to hate, and that was at the center of the madness. I had sealed them all away, leaving a dead place...”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“I must waken these somnolent beasts and teach them something, make them blink, shake their heavy heads, and grope for answers in their sluggish brains. I must breathe life into the dusty air.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“He arranged three hundred pairs of women’s shoes on the stairway that climbed from Taylor Street to Broadway. High heels and flats, running shoes and loafers, all of them heading uphill, as if an army of invisible women had paused to rest while climbing. Danny-boy”
― Pat Murphy, The City, Not Long After

“Robin forgets, I think, that her own religion involved human sacrifice. She is a practicing Christian. She partakes of Holy Communion, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the human son of God who died and rose from the dead to bring back the word of his Father. She believes in the Resurrection, but only as something that happened long ago in a distant land, far removed from her day-to-day life. She believes in God, the Father Almighty. On the other hand, if her next-door neighbor were to claim that God had spoken to him in a vision, she would think him eccentric and possibly dangerous. Her God is a distant patriarch who demands that she attend church and follow a set of ten rules, but he does not deign to pass along new rules through common people. She is accustomed to a God who keeps his distance.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“He was a strange lad—with a peculiar, dreamy air about him that made some think he was dim-witted. But he wasn’t stupid—he just paid attention to other lessons.

Bones”
― Pat Murphy, Points of Departure

“My mother, like the female birds of many species, had developed a drab protective coloration that let her blend into the background, invisible as long as she remained silent. She counseled me to adopt the same strategy, to be quiet and meek, but I could never manage it. I always felt like a fledgling cuckoo bird, hatched from an egg laid in an alien nest, a chick too big, too loud, too rambunctious for its adopted parents. When I graduated from high school, my father suggested that I take a job clerking at the local drugstore. I packed my bags and left.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“I wasn't wearing war paint. But that didn't matter. I didn't need war paint. I was a different person than I had been, back then.”
― Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

“Verla says that no one thinks of himself as a villain. Even the nastiest person thinks that he is in the right.”
― Pat Murphy

“I’ve always wanted to be notorious,” Mary said.
“You are well on your way.” Captain Hook said, refilling her glass of wine.”
― Pat Murphy, The Adventures of Mary Darling