Laura Kalpakian > Quotes

“There are no real Californians. There are only people who live there and people who don't.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family

“When you bite into a chocolate truffle, you don't want to find oat bran.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Educating Waverley

“She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Educating Waverley

“Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family

“With computers, e-mail, you don't hear an actual voice, but you catch a tone in the words on the screen.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family

“The computer is a cool medium. . . . you can keep things crisp, refrigerated in a way.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family

“A strange terrain, that: the dark continent. No man's land and no one woman's: a lush wilderness to be explored jointly by comrades, no barbed wire, no land mines, but a dangerous place all the same, a hot jungle where only desire could be quenched. If you did not burn, you could not go there. A small region — perhaps no larger than the fleshy plains between the hip bones. Perhaps no bigger than a bed: the sheeted moors, pillows mounded into mountain passes, quilts scooped into canyons, woman-and-man-made lakes, perilous passages only lovers could navigate. A country, but not a nation. A trackless peninsula, perpetually discovered, recovered, a land you could return to and yet remain forever lost.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Dark Continent and Other Stories

“She kept the solstices and the equinoxes, both vernal and autumnal, the first of May, All Saints, all summers, kept them, but not out of reverence for the past.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Educating Waverley

“She wrote to make vivid what lay beyond her, whether in the past or the future, to make articulate that imaginative amalgam of wish and memory, to make the lost laugh once more.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Educating Waverley

“Thoughts of course can't be dirty except for ignorance, untruth or ugliness. And why would you think about them anyway.”
― Laura Kalpakian, Educating Waverley