Elizabeth Graver > Quotes

“To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward veerse. Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Now it's dusk, bats swooping and rising along the lawn, against the sea. Would that she could join them-flap wings, fly blind, beat back her foul mood.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“He loves to stop on the corner and watch the ceramics fixer write numbers on the insides of the shards of a broken vase, drill tiny holes, brush the edges with egg white and secure them with wire, an act that gives him hope that anything shattered might, with enough skill and patience, be repaired. He loves the workshop of his music teacher, Oktay, on a narrow street deep in a Muslim quarter, the shop like a birdcage, hung with drying lengths of cane that Oktay fashions into neys, woodwind flutes whose sound—it was Rumi who said it—is not wind but fire.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?”
― Elizabeth Graver, The Honey Thief

“Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Kyen no rizika, no rozika. Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Table salt hardens here. Books mildew. Diaries flip open. Private Property: Please Turn Around.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“I love birds, she says dreamily into her son's ear, or maybe she just thinks it, she the one who taught him to name and spot the rare ones-the bar-tailed godwit, the whimbrel and Blackburnian warbler-just as her father had taught her, first from the fields and beach, then from inside, his wheelchair by the window, Petersons and binoculars in his lap, and she'd bike to the salt creek or climb to the top of the Teal Rock and sit there waiting, then ride back and drop her bike on the grass and go inside, to where the names flew from her mouth into her father's ears, a gift for both of them.

"I love birds." She says it again, or maybe for the first time.
"I know," Charlie says.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“The skull is not broken, or only a little, here. He doesn't actually know it's a female, but he wants it to be. Female and a mother, old, died of natural causes. And somewhere in the sea, her young, no longer young. Their young.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Where are you going, where have you been?
Do you have children? How was the voyage? What is the news of the world? What can I do for you? Please, sit. Eat. She’ll give them the name of Villa Erna, the pension on Carrer del Modolell run by a Jewish family, and Café Cómico, where the Sephardim can learn about jobs, and for the Ashkenazim, the corner café on Còrsega, where they might find Yiddish speakers. Tell them you’ve been to us, she says warmly. Say you’re a friend of a friend.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Ken sos tu? I am Rebecca (Rivka, Rebekah) from my mother’s mother and the wife of Isaac in the Bible. The name means “to tie firmly” or “to snare,” which is why—or so her mother used to tell her when she struggled at sewing—she could, with practice, become skilled with a needle and thread. I am Camayor, from my mother’s father, Behor Camayor of blessed memory, and also Cohen, high priests descended from the sons of Aaron, a name
she feels she must live up to, though she’ll hide it as needed and may God forgive her. I am from the pomegranate tree my father planted at my birth, from my nuns in white habits, my staircase
with the worn ninth tread, the candlelight reflected in my fingernails. I am a gypsy girl, because to have no home place had once seemed romantic and she could do the dance, just as she could climb ropes at gymnastics, rising and lowering at will. Or was it actually that home, back then, was everywhere?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“I love him too and believe he loves me, but does he like me, which is not the same as love?”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Is this what old age is, to believe in less and less?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Is that how it works?” He laughs. “I’m the man of the house if I obey my wife?” “Of course. You didn’t know?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“From her mother, Janie learned to play charades and murder in the dark, to run three-legged races, to spot hermit thrushes, towhees (Mrs. P. said the towhee's call was "Drink your tea!"; Bea said it was "Brush your teeth!"), and tell prairie warblers from the maryland yellowthroat and the great horned from the barred owl by their calls.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Again the thunder clapped. Still Eva stood in the field. Maybe, she thought, a girl struck by lightning would split down the middle and become two girls, and then she'd have a friend. She held out her watch with its metal band, to call the lightning down.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The Honey Thief

“To see your mother as a baby, that is what it's like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“But we also want our children to have a future, and for our grandchildren to grow up safe and not feel ashamed.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Two whole lives, a person might have. Three or four or five. If only. Never before had she felt this fanning out of possibilities; one life had seemed plenty, difficult sometimes, other times fine. Either way, her lot.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Being a father would be different, harder, but might he not (if generations have told themselves the lie, then scan he) do it just a little better than his parents, pass on his best self, discard the rest, or at the very least, do his best by doing his best?”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“this the most corrosive sort of sorrow, the nearby faraway.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Love the sojourner for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“Helen was happy for them, and disdainful, and jealous of them for getting more of each other while she got less of them, and, mostly, astonished-that life could actually move forward like this into adulthood.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“In the air the birds are clever, acrobatic, but when they land on the road they turn to lumps of coal, then lift together when a person or vehicle draws near. She watches the flight eddies, the trading of partners, the way the patterns form, dissolve and reconfigure like one machine in motion-yet each bird with its own small, muscled heart...at the same time that she carries a knowledge that she's been seeing these birds year after year (and always here) and that the medium they pass through is not just space but also time.”
― Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

“The more her circumstances are reduced, the more care she takes with her clothes, carrying an instinctual sense of them as both mask and portal, but she may as well be invisible to her father.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika