Jim Shepard > Quotes

“You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.”
― Jim Shepard

“What makes us threaten the things we want most?”
― Jim Shepard, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.”
― Jim Shepard

“I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.”
― Jim Shepard, Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“But what I did was the kind of thing you'd do and the kind of thing you've done: I felt bad for him and for myself and I went on with my week and then my summer and I started telling my story to whoever would listen. And my story was this: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked.”
― Jim Shepard, Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“Lately it's started to seem to me that here in America our fetishization of self-reliance has taken a wrong turn and has helped enable us to jettison compassion as a national value while still maintaining a vision of ourselves as essentially well-meaning. It hasn't taken a whole lot of common sense, given the evidence of the last few years, to puzzle out the heartlessness of unregulated capitalism, and yet our political class has embraced even more fervently the notion of every man for himself, even given the ever-growing numbers such a philosophy leaves behind.”
― Jim Shepard

“She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.”
― Jim Shepard

“The child has the right to respect,’ ” he said. “ ‘The child has the right to develop. The child has the right to be. The child has the right to grieve. The child has the right to learn. And the child has the right to make mistakes.’ ”
― Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron

“the cure for a toothache was to slap the other side of your face.”
― Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron

“At home i let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.”
― Jim Shepard

“I just go through life not doing anything to anyone, wreaking havoc left and right.”
― Jim Shepard

“But this is the only account hand-copied and tacked to my bulletin board, the testimony of a Dutch pilot caught on shore near Anjer, a city now gone: 'The moment of greatest anguish was not the actual destruction of the wave. The worst part by far was afterwards, when I knew I was saved, and the receding flood carried back past me the bodies of friends and neighbors and family. And I remember clawing past other arms and legs as you might fight through a bramble. And I thought, 'The world is our relentless adversary, rarely outwitted, never tiring.' And I thought, 'I would give all these people's lives, once more, to see something so beautiful again.”
― Jim Shepard, Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories

“The salt of the earth dissolves and the shit remains,”
― Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron

“I had this real hardass for a tutorial in grad school,' Jeannine finally said. 'And this one time when I told him that maybe my project hadn't panned out because it had been too ambitious, he said that he'd always thought that the moral of the Icarus story was not 'Don't try to fly too high.' He said he thought it was 'Do a better job on the wings.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“Dyer holds that the first twelve days of January portend the weather for the next twelve months.”
― Jim Shepard (author), The World to Come: Stories

“We do not see our hand in what happens, and so we call certain events melancholy accidents… —Stanley Cavell”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“loneliness as solitude with self-pity thrown in.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“In the U.S., whichever party was in power wasn't interested in support for public health. Public health never competed well for resources in either the House or the Senate. Countries were like people: they didn't value health until they lost it. And then once they got it back, they returned to their old complacency.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“It took a month after the breakup for her to realize that she was refusing to go anywhere that didn't have cell service on the off chance he'd call, and after that revelation she [Jeannine Dziri] found herself wondering if you were wrong to believe that you went on as yourself even after the loss of that person who had so decisively shaped you.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“The billions of texts, tweets, photos, videos, and other postings tsunami-ing in all directions in response to the general panic featured some helpful information, the way in negotiating a nearly impenetrable rain forest you might every so often come across an edible piece of fruit. The good news was that the internet democratized and facilitated the sharing of information, and that was the bad news, as well....On the one hand, useful information might have been pouring in from everywhere; on the other, you had to stir through the stew of journalism and entertainment and horseshit and noise to find it. And anything was probably more comforting than the official story, which seemed perpetually to be 'We're working on it,' and with so many more appealing options out there reality was being abandoned the way you might walk away from farmland that had lost its water source.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“Her [Valerie Landry's] mentor in med school had reminded her more than once that doctors got even less time than families had to deal with patients dying. Someone died and the relatives went off by themselves and collapsed, but you still had the rest of your shift to get through.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“My mother thinks that what keeps me going is a well of spitefulness.' ... 'I think she's right. I can feel it right here.”
― Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron