Harriet Doerr > Quotes

“They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.”
― Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra

“It is something they will see everywhere - a disregard for danger, a companionship with death. By the end of a year they will know it well: the antic bravado, the fatal games, the coffin shop beside the cantina, the sugar skulls on the frosted cake.”
― Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra

“We have come to live among specters, Sara tells herself. They are not people, but silhouettes sketched on a backdrop to deceive us into thinking that the stage is crowded. She searches for an expression, any expression, in their eyes - the eyes of that man on the corner whose raised hand holds a cigarette he is allowing to burn to his fingers; the eyes of that woman who has lifted a dripping jar of water halfway to her head. They will never speak to me, she thinks. I will never know their names.”
― Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra

“Writing derives from an accumulation of experience. It's as if you collect facts and observations over time, like a stone to stand on. From there, imagination takes over.”
― Harriet Doerr

“Sara understood this passion that beset geologists. Their minds were heavy with theories shaped by fire and water, their pockets weighted with residual bits of evidence chipped from road cuts and canyon walls, identifiable, able to be pigeonholed in time that stretched back five hundred million years. She understood that the rock in the Canadian's hand was likely to endure intact long after the bones of the four people in this room would be discovered set in sandstone among snail shells and ferns.”
― Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra

“Paco had a way with plants.....Sara believed that whenever he walked under a tree it
grew a new branch to shade him.”
― Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra

“Our lives are brief beyond our comprehension or our desire, she told herself. We drop like cottonwood leaves from trees after a single frost. The interval between birth and death is scarcely more than a breathing space. Tonight, in her house on a Mexican hill, Ursula Bowles listened to the five assembled in her sala and thought she heard the faint rustle of their days slipping by. She could see now that an individual life is, in the end, nothing more than a stirring of air, a shifting of light. No one of us, finally, can be more than that. Even Einstein. Even Brahms. Then the widow slept.”
― Harriet Doerr, Consider This, Señora

“With the coming of these people who know the language, we are losing our liberty to speak, he remarked to himself.”
― Harriet Doerr, Consider This, Señora

“Please wait,' she said in Spanish, then repeated the words, 'Esperen, por favor,' remembering that the single verb meant both to wait and hope. This extraordinary language, she thought.”
― Harriet Doerr, Consider This, Señora