Tara Conklin > Quotes

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.

And yet, And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we teach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“The greatest works of poetry are the stories we tell about ourselves.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Over the years she had learned to fold down rising emotion just as she would fold the clean bedsheets, the sheet growing smaller and tighter with each pass until all that remained of that wide wrinkled expanse of cotton was a hard closed-in square.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Our mother taught us how to protect ourselves from hurt but not how to determine what might be worth the risk.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Just to sit for a moment, herself, no one claiming her time or her thoughts or the product of her mind and hands. What other word to call that if not freedom?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Better was largely irrelevant when it came to mothering because the entire enterprise relied on the presumption that one day, sooner than you thought, your child would become an entirely self-reliant, independent person who made her own decisions. That child wouldn't necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she'd wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends. It didn't matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child waled off in to the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Some people will choose, again and again, to destroy what it is they value most.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Two hundred and fifty years of nameless, faceless, forgotten individuals. Yes, they were America's founding fathers and mothers as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whips upon their backs. Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?”
― Tara Conklin

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it. And yet. And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for? Acknowledgments This book was a long time coming.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Truth was multilayered, shifting; it was different for everyone, each personal history carved unique from the same weighty block of time and flesh.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Without Joe our atoms did not know where to rest, how to behave. We were free radicals, spinning in our own small orbits, dangerous, poisonous, causing invisible but elemental damage to anything we touched.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“If there is one lesson I wish to bestow upon you, one shred of wisdom I have gained from my living, dying days, it is this: let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always a vague emptiness within him. It is the emptiness that drives him and he does not know even how to name that thing that might fill it. No idea of home or love or peace comes to him. He does not know, so he cannot stop. On and on he moves. and the emptiness blinds him and pulls at him and he is like a newborn baby searching for the teat, knowing it is there, but where?
And sometimes such a man is handed a gift. A gift of direction. A path that is marked for him and there, yes, this will ease your suffering, it is sure. This will cure you, it will fill you up, at least for a time. There will be a home, and love, there will no longer be the sorrow when you look at a cold night sky, the sorrow as the sun rises and the mist burns away.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“It was irrational, illogical, obsessive, unhealthy, and absolutely necessary.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“The things you can control and the things you cannot.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Caroline. Listen to me. You have to decide what you love. Joe wasn't the only one. You have to decide now and hold on. Start small. Begin with the small things and work up from here.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl