Joan Wickersham > Quotes

“And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the slow absorption of a bruise.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“The word "miss" is so wistful. As is the word "wistful," for that matter. They both have sighs embedded in them, that "iss" sound. Which also sounds like if.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork.”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“She knows by now that grief is about endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back.”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“Those moments of knowing are sharp and merciless, but then they fade out, like stars when the sky gets light in the morning. You know, and then you don't know.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors.
"I will refute them with new works," he said.
It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today. (172)”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“What we did not say was that with these hurts an edge was worn down. It happens out of necessity -- it would not be safe to carry a knife that sharp. But something is lost too: that early, perfect, impractical sharpness, which is so beautiful but which cannot survive being seen. (171)”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like "similar"?”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“Time and judgment collaborate to produce farce, and farce in turn contains much truth; major characters upon the stage may turn out to be lackeys in disguise, while the figures we have overlooked in the midst of the frenetic action unmask and reveal themselves as divinities. (160)”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“My feelings-let's hold on to this idea of them as shuffling Victorians, let's make them servants, an entire uniformed household staff- were fresh, raw, perpetually startled.They weren't sensible. But they behaved themselves for a while. They were frank, earthy even, among themselves; but they were discreet. They were invisible, I wasn't even required to know their names. I underestimated their docility and overestimated my own power, and like all fables about arrogance, this one turned menacing.”
― Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

“Young" and "Poor" sounded so promising, the way my mother always told the story. Temporary conditions: poignant "befores" that existed only to contrast with the triumphant "afters.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“It's Violent.
You imagine it deafening, red, boiling-hot. It's like a comic book: the bright colors, the crude outlines, the words in capital letters: BANG!SMASH!CRUNCH! You think "smithereens."
You crave the explosion.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“Not just the beating. The words. 'Boris, you're stubborn, lazy, worthless, you can't do anything right, you're evil' -- at least once I heard him call Boris evil. When you grow up with things like that, you never get rid of them, never. Words like that are a tape that plays in your head for the rest of your life.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“That's how it went between us. We would have a horrible fight, which at the time would feel insurmountable. It was impossible to see how we would continue from there. And then somehow, we would continue.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“You are like a nearsighted person who can see the cracks in the bowl when she's wearing glasses -- and so chooses not to wear glasses while looking at the bowl.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“I forgot it all again, afterward. Those moments of knowing are sharp and merciless, but then they fade out, like stars when the sky gets light in the morning. You know, and then you don’t know. And then comes another moment when you’re learning—something new, or the same things over and over again.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“Or maybe she simply couldn't stay merry. That subversive, candid merriment of hers was enchanting, electric; but it was a social phenomenon. It was something elicited by, and dazzling to, a new acquaintance. It was like makeup: it looked good in public, but in private, sooner or later it had to come off.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“Suicide isn’t just a death, it’s an accusation. It’s a violent, public declaration of loneliness. It’s a repudiation of connection. It says, “You weren’t enough to keep me here.” It sets up unresolvable dilemmas of culpability and fault: were we to blame for being insufficient, or was he to blame for finding us so? Someone had been weighed and found wanting, but who?”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order