Susannah Dickey > Quotes

“Perhaps living contentedly is just finding pursuits that distract you from thoughts of oblivion. It occurs to you that everyone else probably figured this out long ago. You pick up another biscuit. You hum.”
― Susannah Dickey, Tennis Lessons

“Her childhood was a calm one, worthy of being mythologized not for what was happening beyond the walls of their house but for what was happening within them, for the specificities of her small, resected world.”
― Susannah Dickey, Common Decency

“You try not to think about the future. When you do it seems to come in stock video clips that have nothing to do with what is happening in your life right now. The only connection is that you are there somehow, as if by accident.(..) These images exist as clearly and seem as probable, if not more so as your life currently. None of them are any more or any less appealing than the others. and what matters is that in all of them, you seem content and things are decided. The difficulty lies in the great grey expanse between the you of now and the you of these images. The necessary steps towards one are so different from those towards another that it seems reckless to choose. Instead, you float closer and closer to the edge of that expanse, not allowing yourself to think about what will happen when you reach it. You're not convinced you won't just fade into nothing, into grey dust. This outcome, too, seems like something beyond your control.”
― Susannah Dickey, Tennis Lessons

“She thought the capacity of another person to have depicted a pain similar to your own, to have transmuted it into language, implied that eventually there might be the means for you to process it.”
― Susannah Dickey, Common Decency