Stefan Merrill Block > Quotes

“...that the basic transaction of life itself was a sad, endless amalgam of public endurance and private indulgence.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“There weren't words for it. It was like trying to photograph a sunset or telling the story of a dream dreamt, a private intensity, and attempts at its reproduction could only be met with a shrug.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“Frederick knows better than to believe, as his wife sometimes claims to, that all things happen for a reason. Things happen; it is up to us to invent for them a purpose.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Storm at the Door

“Sometimes, the world suddenly seemed equal to what I required of it. But, otherwise, I was under the world, a cockroach-man scuttling beneath stones in filth, scrambling from the light. Or else I was above the world, as certain and mighty as a fundamental force, as electricity. The sadness of always being at a distance from things, above or else beneath.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Storm at the Door

“But the actual object, that bundle of papers, is a telltale heart. She buried it long ago, and still it thumps its maddening beat.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Storm at the Door

“The tragedy of love....is that it is only possible to love perfectly a person who is lost to you; only a lost person, lodged in a place before the narrow, clumsy gates of language, could ever understand you perfectly.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving: A Novel

“Could there be anything more sad and more lonely than remembering what terrible things the future will bring?”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“One day,” Mom says”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“Mama only snorted. A terse, ironic half laugh, the kind of angry chortle that powered Mama through her daily drudgery, as if it were the exhaust from an internal engine that runs on pure sass.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“Simple happiness exists, and you must gather it around yourself. With enough will you can choose to believe in a better life, until the better life becomes yours.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Storm at the Door

“Closure was just a prayer for an ending that would never come,”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving

“Survival was not a story you could tell. Survival was the telling, and that was the burden and the gift of the living.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving

“No one seems to be trying hard enough to do anything... What if we made them all chronically dissatisfied?”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“To remember nothing," they would say. "What more could one possibly ask of eternity?”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“Yet he know they had everything to celebrate. It was just being young and everything being in the future.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving

“Maybe there was relief to be found in the prospect of having no choice.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

“That morning still existed somewhere, that place where any other future could still happen.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving