Edith Pearlman > Quotes

“Still she wondered: did the present deliver up the future, or must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist?”
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories

“He gave her that last word. He gave her his love. He would think of her almost every day for the rest of his life. Only his presence would he withhold.”
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories

“I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference."
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, (from "Mates")”
― Edith Pearlman

“But you said the words you knew, which were not always the ones you meant.”
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories

“What a rich phrase. You could live a life on the income it yielded.”
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories

“What counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you.”
― Edith Pearlman, Honeydew

“They were relieved that I was chosen by a human being," she'd said to Angelica in her dry voice. "They were braced for an interspecies liaison.”
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories

“It was as if she had once been almost smothered and then allowed to live only if she limited her vocabulary and breathed hardly at all.”
― Edith Pearlman, Honeydew: Stories

“Later, at four in the morning, Myron encounters his eldest son, Sean, in the kitchen. They talk about schoolwork (Sean has an imminent exam), about what Sean would like to become (a physicist and a poet). “Medio tutissimus ibis,” Sean’s father says, and the son translates, “You will be safest in the middle.” (All three boys know their Ovid.) Son and father regard each other, and Myron says, or perhaps merely thinks, the following: “My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I. . . . I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child’s hand so gently against Leo’s infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed.”
― Edith Pearlman, Honeydew