Marianne Wiggins > Quotes

“You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

“...what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.”
― Marianne Wiggins

“...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

“Wherever love comes from, whatever is its genesis, it isn’t like a quantity of gold or diamonds, even water in the earth-a fixed quantity, Fos thought. You can’t use up love, deplete it at its source. Love exists beyond fixed limits. Beyond what you can see or count.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“You speak your mind, don't you...? A rare find in a woman.”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

“There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same--fleeting and unknowable--for every one of us. I lived.”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

“Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future will always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has run to sea.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“Art, their father had frequently told them, was exactly that: to make art is the realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel with and for a stranger.”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

“I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“What being in the War and being in the Army had shown him was that people tend naturally toward light, toward its source, as sunflowers do in a field.
People lean, either in their dreams or in their actions, toward that place where they suspect their inner lights are coming from. Whether they call it God or conscience or the manual of Army protocol, people sublime toward where their inner fire burns, and given enough fuel for thought and a level playing field to dream on, anyone can leave a fingerprint on the blank of history. That's what
Fos believed.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“I know that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without distrubing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame.
I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that in back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“It makes you wonder. How much you can know about a thing, a person. If you can know anything at all. Maybe no one’s who we think they are. No one. Makes you doubt yourself, wonder if you even know yourself or if you’ve been lyin, too, along with everybody else.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“You build a tower then you also build the chance it will fall. To think of life as a foolproof is a falacy of fools, he thought. Things happen, he believed, and there’s nothing you can do to keep them from occuring.”
― Marianne Wiggins

“Because way back before you were even born there was this girl you see. And I fell in love with her. It was something that I wanted-love-not because it was expected of me, but because I found it out my self-that happiness of wanting to be with that other person.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“Her father...was all front to back in his transparency: what you saw was what there was, there was nothing clandestine in his character, and those few aspects that were disguised or hidden were that way because they were his closely kept emotions. When on those rare occasions he allowed his emotions to be seen, their appearance was all the more surprising. And more powerful. Which taught her early on a thing or two about the power of what's visible -- it derives its mystery from what it hides. How many stories had she heard of people sensing ghosts behind the walls, hobgoblins in the woods? People living on the shores of lakes since time began have conjured creatures from those depths. If you believe a thing is something different from the evidence before you, if you believe something is hidden by the wall or in the woods or beneath the surface of the lake, then that belief gives power to the darkness and the depths -- power to enchant; to terrify.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“To love is to accept that one might die another death before one dies one's own.”
― Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar

“The sight of Fos and Opal coming down the street together absolutely tickled him. The idea of two such strangely unremarkable yet lovable people could have found and met each other reaffirmed his waning faith in anything remotely optimistic about mankind and seemed to be a more convincing proof than all the gospel shit flown from the pulpits of Knox County that life could, in fact, distribute happy endings.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“It's not how long it glows. It's not how long the light lasts. It's what it says while it's still visible.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“What if that were true?
Was that so bad?
To have created love like that out of absolutely nothing—it was a sort of miracle, wasn't it? To have set that kind of example for their son—for Flash—for everyone who saw them fumbling along together, walking, talking, marveling at life. It was a kind of glory, if he thought about it, he realized. A common uncontested outright glory for mankind, he thought. Like each and every unnamed, uncontested, unsung star up there, coupling with the dark for us to contemplate in silence.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

“The past is carried to us on simple things—a written page, a spoon, a glove, a bowl of water: carried by the souls who touched them, those plain relics emanate, a language, freed of time, language without cadence—mute and eerie as the sound a granite planet makes giving birth to mountains, coursing its way through space.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Properties of Thirst

“when Flash started to speak about love the word floated in the same sort of way, only closer in and brighter and with far more mystery, but also with the smell of eggs, and other men, and beer.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

“Life is a series of collisions, for fucksake. It’s not a narrative experience.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

“Most people have a perceptual tripwire which registers the trespass of another’s focused interest.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

“Youth never sees its shadow till the sun’s about to set: and then you wonder where the person went who you were speaking to in all your thoughts for all those years.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

“lungs.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Properties of Thirst

“NEVER TRUST A MAN WHO DOESN’T COOK,”
― Marianne Wiggins, Properties of Thirst

“Frost came behind the rain, and the resulting scene across the fields was a ponded desecration, frozen like a photograph of ruin, an upheaval painted with the hues of autumn which had bled to mud.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

“It’s like one big lending library out there. A piece of what was once a star or something, a flower or a willow tree, when it is finished bein’ that might be loaned away an’ become a fish or a person’s fingernail or evaporate into the sky and be a rainbow. That the—what did he call ’em?—stuff that makes your atoms up an’ mine, that stuff mixed up a little different is the sum of all the stuff that’s in existence.”
― Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

“...a novelist...we dream non-living characters and animate them with out words...”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher