Helen Phillips > Quotes

“...and one of those neat spiral stairways in the far corner-I wonder where it leads. Spiral staircases always seem to me like they must lead somewhere special.”
― Helen Phillips, Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green

“The thing is, May," the hum said, "the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened / melted, maddened / melted, maddened / melted.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices.”
― Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“We are all villains,” the hum said. “The system only gives us villainous options.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. —JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Zahir”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“But were the words his own, or were they an option offered him by his phone? He never called her “love” and was generally meticulous with commas and periods. Then again, he could have been in a rush, which would explain the poor punctuation and the uncharacteristic term of endearment, shorthand for tenderness he didn’t have time to express. But Jem’s phone knew that the occasional dropped piece of punctuation was typical of his texting tendencies at times, the error evidence of authenticity, and so the phone might reproduce the error, in order to reproduce the authenticity.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Molly wanted to sway to sleep in the hammock of her children’s breathing.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“Incredulous, she took hold of his hand. Despite the distance that sometimes grew untended between them: she was known by him.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“I just want to feel immaculate for a few minutes a day,”
― Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“She had used her money to wrap good things around her family, while in the city outside these walls millions of people craved those good things.
In no time at all, she would be a craver again.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened/melted, maddened/melted, maddened/melted.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“The hum paused for the programmed amount of time. Long enough to gesture toward thoughtfulness, not long enough to stall the conversation.
"Please have a regular day tomorrow, May.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy. —PARACELSUS”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“A life lived in fear is a life half-lived,”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“Kitchen-sink cookies," Trishiffany proclaimed. "Sounds disgusting, right? But I've always been so torn about chocolate chips versus butterscotch chips, but here you don't even have to choose. Walnuts and peanuts! Oatmeal and cornflakes! Raisins and dried cherries. Not to mention the shredded coconut. Sometimes we just need our little freedoms, you know?”
― Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“they had agreed to give the children small, quick names, names that could disguise themselves within other words. Solution, sudsy. Synthesis, lullaby.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Their time here was brief, yes, slipping through their fingers: but it occurred to her that every day was not twenty-four hours, it was actually ninety-six, each of the four of them living in their own twenty-four hours side by side.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“She had forgotten so much of it, those early years, this or that picture taken by a tree, in the bath, on a swing, on the subway. They had been so cute at so many moments that had just washed over her. Lu and Sy standing on the coffee table, holding hands, gazing gravely at the phone, both naked but for transparent ballet skirts. If not for these pictures, these sturdy images pulled out of the blur of her memory, her life would have no solidity.
She hated to glimpse herself in the pictures though. Her face raw with exhaustion and raw with love. Hard to look at.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“She wondered if other mothers experienced it, this permanent state of mild panic, and worried that perhaps they didn't, that perhaps there was something wrong with her.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“You feel disoriented, May," the hum said. "You are unsure how to be in the world as it is now. You know the world is damaged, but you don't know what that means for the lives of your children. You want to prepare them for the future, but you are scared to picture the future. You are seeking inside yourself the scrappiness, the courage, that will power the rest of your life. Am I right, May?”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“It was with some pride that she screwed the tops onto the bottles of milk. Nearly four ounces in each. She pressed the pair of bottles, warm with her milk, against her cheeks. Partway the accomplishment of an animal, partway the accomplishment of a deity.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“And besides, hadn’t she herself—spotting a cam on a lamppost or in a tree, reminded that the air around her was abuzz with data—sometimes had the urge to hide her face or peel it off, to do the same to the faces of her children?”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“A vision flashed through her, of Jem aging, bad morning-and-coffee breath, his body sagging, his body a sack, a conveyance device for his intestines. But this vision yielded to another: under the covers, pressing her own sack of blood and bones against his sack of blood and bones, arms and legs interwoven, two flimsy bodies safe together.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“He was gazing down at his phone, his shoulders tense, his spine curling toward it.

She had the urge to call out to him, startle him with her voice: What’s in your phone that isn’t right here in front of you?

There is a naked person in your bed. There is a breeze in the yard.

Yet she knew there was plenty in his phone that wasn’t right here in front of him. The entire universe.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“she sacrificed herself to one of the ready-made replies: All good! A prickle of regret. That artificial exclamation mark.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“The thing is, May,” the hum said, “the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.”
― Helen Phillips, Hum

“Brilliant, Molly thought, the cheese samples would absorb the kids while she finished the last bit of shopping for the party - the juice boxes, the rainbow sprinkles, the streamers, the other expenses and excesses of the exhausted mother. What a thing it was, grocery shopping, so tedious and so crucial.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“It puzzled her that orgasm wasn’t widely considered a phenomenon that challenges everything we believe about human existence—doesn’t it serve as proof of an alternate state of being? Isn’t the fact that people can feel this way, so in thrall to this enigmatic force, so carried by it, even for an instant, evidence that the state in which we spend most of our time is merely one possibility?”
― Helen Phillips, The Need

“The two women and their single shadow left the palace on a street paved with gold. They walked until the gold turned to dirt, and they kept walking. The road was long and straight. No sound but the sound of pebbles shifting beneath their feet. Sometimes one would carry the baby. Sometimes the other would carry the baby. They did not have water or anything else. They walked. They were two women with one live child and one ghost child. They were two women with four children. They were three women with six children, nine women with eighteen children, fifty women with a hundred children, five hundred women with a thousand children, their single shadow before them.”
― Helen Phillips, The Need