Joseph McElroy > Quotes

“Novels are narratives to be in. To live in. To exist in. Not primarily forms to jump into and get to the end of. It’s a substance that the great big novel becomes…which invites you to be in it, not necessarily to leave it. To move around in it. To move laterally.”
― Joseph McElroy

“And isn't this hard when we ourselves are always at the beginning of ourselves?”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.”
― Joseph McElroy, Lookout Cartridge

“Opera's not for everyone, especially at these prices.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.”
― Joseph McElroy

“People R Matter.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“And when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?--that's a burglar with self-respect.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“...for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new us...”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, you'd get in there and go so deep you'd never stop falling.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“...but sovereign borders will mean Water haves and have-nots.”
― Joseph McElroy

“When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightening by an imbalance between earth and heaven.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“We remember what's going on. Already remember what's been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Many men never locate their own truth. They're scared to wager their glistening years finding out.”
― Joseph McElroy

“She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people, it seems.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“I sat reading from first thing in the morning till the middle of the afternoon. I used to get a phone call twice a day for a while. A variety of dirty phone calls I called a Sadness Call or a Tragedy Call: I'd pick up, and all I'd hear was someone weeping.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“You find yourself in other people.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber's school where I go for a $4.99 haircut and an experience.”
― Joseph McElroy, Night Soul and Other Stories

“And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world...”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Do you ever feel,' she wonders, 'that we fit into a large life that doesn't know us but--hold us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breath. All alone we have to invent even that.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“The Void is the nothing you may assume about your future.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“(I'm building backwards naturally.)”
― Joseph McElroy, The Letter Left to Me

“He's seeing things, he's a victim of last night, last year, of what he's read or been told; and he's sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“There is no future. It's sentiment about what might have been.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“It is through each other that we can see.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Life's in parts, and some go together and some don't, and some incongruously don't, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“He alone can return to Earth to try to do something, only to find that all he can do is try to know what happened.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“And what is your story? someone interrupts. What did you do to end up in this endless community of minds?”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men