Sarah Bernstein > Quotes

“Sometimes we will the darkness into being because the anticipation is a thing much more terrible, and I knew that we both had apprehended even in girlhood the bad days to come.”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“Yes, I thought, as I wiggled my toes under the duvet, each of us has in our mouths the incomparable taste of our own lives. We roll it around with our tongues, over and under, above and below. We hold it in or else we spit it out. And sometimes, sometimes we choke on it.”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“I felt like the exposed root of a tooth in the mouth of the world as it wolfed down the day.”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“it’s not the meek who inherit the earth. The meek get kicked in the teeth.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“what little I knew of men suggested that they were constitutionally incapable of being alone, terrified of not being admired, and seemed to regard ageing and its effects as a personal failing.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“In taking a side, I thought uneasily, perhaps I ought to take the long view, the survival of the species as a whole. That was my problem, I thought, I was always thinking at the level of the individual, in this case the rabbit, the grim scene unfolding before me in the garden as the kite pecked at the belly of the poor beast, initiating a gyration in the corpse or almost corpse of the poor rabbit, a kind of organy wobbling. Now what was that that reminded me of? A hanging, tremulous, a doorway and a tidy garden. What happened to one’s past when one got beyond it?”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“How, I wondered, might a person, a people, take root, roots and rootlessness, the preservation of what little remains of the past, such were thoughts that blew through me on any given morning, standing very still in the porch, or in the garden, in my bare feet, feeling suddenly: that sound, that rushing, it is the wind, it is the trees!”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“I had hoped that here in the country I would experience the turn of the seasons differently, with less apprehension, I might come to see the form and plan of the world. Not to frame it within systems of understanding, of domination, no, I would work to allow the world its right to illegibility, to move in darkness. To take shape in its contact with people but to remain essentially itself. In the country, I would overcome this final difficulty at last, renounce my will to knowledge, give up my attachment to expression, and in this way come to understand the meaning of things.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine, so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated, perhaps not even yet imagined, providing my siblings with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste, ministering the complex curative draughts prescribed to them by various doctors, serving their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and bedside glasses of milk.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“... and the trees covered the sky a little more each year.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“her sentencer constellations of ruptures in my desire for order”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“I felt that Clara was bringing the things I said into being, that my thoughts were being admitted to the sensible universe, transformed into atoms of pure glass one could hold in the palm of one’s hand, turn over and over.”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“I kept up with my work for the legal firm, continuing the transcription of the audio notes of one of the firm’s partners, presently engaged by a multinational oil and gas corporation to pursue every possible course of action against a certain individual, who happened also to be a member of the legal profession, and who had sought to prove, indeed had proven in law in certain countries though not his own, gross malfeasance on the part of the multinational’s leaders that had resulted in the poisoning of a number of water courses, the destruction of ancient woodland, the decimation of at least two protected species of birds, the kidnapping of activists and the corruption of public officials, as well as tax fraud, racketeering, stock-market manipulation and other crimes besides. The firm for which I worked, in representing this multinational oil and gas corporation, had already succeeded in having the attorney in question disbarred in several states, provinces, unincorporated territories and crown dependencies; in some but not in all places he could no longer practice law, the only profession he had ever dreamed of pursuing, he explained in a podcast interview from his home, where he was at present under house arrest.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“If I had learned anything in life it was that in the world of creation, nothing stayed still; everything was becoming and dissolving.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“I had thought that we could still talk to each other, you and I, but it turns out that this world severs everything tender. We try to communicate, without hesitation, without digression or justification. But all this means is that life has succeeded in duping us, in pulling the wool over our eyes, in making us believe that there is anything possible besides a terrible silence.”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“her sentences constellations of ruptures in my desire for order”
― Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days

“I was moved by the trees that lined the road, reaching over and across, towards one another. The crowns of birches, of oaks and elms, all rolling against the sky, flashing up their pale undersides in the wind, how was it that very thing brought me so low? It was only a tree in springtime, only the memory of sitting in the empty bleachers behind the high school, still a girl, feeling as if my skin would burst open, but nothing, nothing ever happened. It was not a message or an omen. It was not loneliness. What, then? What was this air one breathed?”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“I try always to be good.”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience