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

“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

“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

“One day,” Mom says, “you’ll learn that a mother isn’t really a separate person. It’s like Mum holds half of my brain, my own memories.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“His town’s tragedy had become a relatively small statistic”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving

“It’s like there’s a bonfire all built in place in front of me now”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“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

“But often loneliness just annihilates itself, with a gun, pills, a blade, a needle.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“A perfect solution. Plus I can rescue the creative streak of the next Charles Dickens here before that school quashes it completely.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“There is no greater question in her life than how best to keep her children occupied and happy, and learning when they can. The completeness of their need for her is all she ever really needs.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“Even those lonely children who survive will continue to exhibit heightened paranoia, fear of others, their isolation deepening their isolation.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

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

“the latest”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Oliver Loving

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

“And even if, today, we will make our way to clear waters, we’ll never really get clear of that haunting, not in the long run, not with both our lives.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“Everyone else’s story has other people. Without other people, what story, what kind of book-worthy life, can I ever hope for?”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“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

“It won't be until much later, years from now, that I'll seek out other former homeschoolers, and realize how common, how deep this fear can run: to confront your homeschool teacher or to hurt them in ways they might never forgive is to risk losing not only a parents but also your entire childhood social sphere, the worldview in which you were raised. It is potentiallly an act of self-exile from a home country to which you can never again return, and maybe this fear is one reason why there still aren't proper regulations on homeschooling, why homeschool kids can still so easily vanish from the world. With the odds stacked so heavily against speaking out - and homeschooling still a relatively new phenomenon - so many of the necessary stories have not yet been told.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

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

“she knows she must do what she can to hold on to it, this narrow second of perfection.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

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

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

“Holt wrote in his 1964 debut How Children Fail, “school is a place where children learn to be stupid.” In his 1969 The Underachieving School, Holt was even blunter: “Schools are bad places for kids.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“This school seems to be a kind of factory for the processing of our young brains.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“One day,” Mom says, “you’ll learn that a mother isn’t really a separate person. It’s like Mum holds half of my brain, my own memories. It’s like a part of me is disappearing too.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“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