Laura van den Berg > Quotes

“The two impulses cannot be separated. The desire to have a life and the desire to disappear from it. The world is unlivable and yet we live in it every day.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“Winds shake the leaves and for a moment I smell smoke. I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“She could go on into infinity, and yet she understood that knowing another person was not a stable condition. Knowing was kinetic, ineffable, and it had limits, but the precise location of those limits, the moment at which the knowing stopped and the not-knowing began, was invisible. You would know you had reached the border only after you had surpassed it.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“I like having a job where I get to wear a mask all day.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“If you have no way to mark the hours, no variance in the days, time will open its mouth and swallow you.”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“Over time, we became less sure we were something the other wanted to hold on to.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe I wanted someone to blame. I was willing to entertain those possibilities. What I didn't understand was why I couldn't do anything more than stand around in pain.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“Hope is a seductive thing," he says. "Hope can make people lose all sense.”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“My point here is that the grieving are very dangerous, Richard said. They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner.

Okay, said Clare.

They are deranged, he continued. They shouldn't be let out of the house. Immediately after the funeral some sort of waiting period should be instituted, a period of confinement. It is a matter of public safety.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“It was brutal, the mortality contract. It came for everyone and no one was prepared.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“The big alone," he said. "That's all any of us has in the end. Nothing can protect us from it, not careers or children or spouses or money or lovers.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“The human mind is a great thicket of mystery. So much remains unknown. And yet we are expected--in fact required--to live our lives alongside this inscrutable entity that might, at any moment, turn on us.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“The five scientists from the Brazilian station always sat at their own table, isolated by their tragedy, which I understood. After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“A nightmare becomes a nightmare when you start to believe it will never end.”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“Death could make a person feel righteous in a way they had no right to be. Nothing in the world was less personal and nothing felt more like a poison arrow sent straight for your heart.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“She might have said, I am not who you think I am. She might have said, I am experiencing a dislocation of reality.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“Intimacy could distort one's vantage, that much was true. Sometimes trying to see the whole of a person could be like describing a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas, though my husband would have argued that I hadn't wanted to see from a different angle, hadn't wanted to step back.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing. She imagined herself standing over a grave with a shovel and hacking away at the soil.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“If your unconscious mind wishes you to be well, you are well. If it wishes you to be sick, you become sick. If it wishes you to die, you die.”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“I've lost the desire to hold onto that last physical artifact of the life I once had, as though I was buried and re-emerged as a person who doesn't believe in anything except the way existence rages on, furiously unconscious of when one life ends and another begins.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“I wondered if God found people like me annoying, those who turned to prayer only when they were neck-deep, that terrible friend we've all had.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“Do you have any ChapStick?” the factory co-worker asks me on the way home. I covertly slip my hand under my shirt and slide two fingers into my belly button. I pull out the ChapStick and pass it to him. “This ChapStick is the perfect temperature,” he says as he spreads it across his lips.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“All this disappointment was, I felt, intensified by the terrible movements in our world. There has never been a worse time to be a bystander, to be the person who says, That was taken out of context, or, There are always two sides, or, We don't yet know the whole story.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“It was my habit to lie to strangers, because how would they know the difference?”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“I would whisper in the back row. Just run away. He never did, of course, and it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday, the rattle of a train in a tunnel. The sweet grit of toothpaste. The bitterness of coffee and blood. The dark of the Hospital at night. My mother’s face, when she was young. *   *   * Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine and sidewalk. What is a beginning and what is an end.”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Clare said, with bitterness. What doesn't kill you leaves you alive, Richard countered. She spat water onto the floor. What doesn't kill you only leaves you feeling broken and insane.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel