Hailie’s Reviews > The Book of Goose > Status Update

“Fabienne and I did not dritt apart overnight, but through the summer and fall, even as we continued to spend time together, we both knew that it was futile. Quietness set in— not the quietness we used to share, the ease of two turtle-doves perched on a fence, neither making a sound but each attentive, ready to answer the other's cooing.”

“But her personality, I now understand, was impaired by her desire to be good and to be right. To be good was in her nature. However, where does the desire to be right lead one, if not to the wrong place?
[…] I was too young then to dread a person like her. I have since encountered other versions of Catalina; each time I have to reeducate myself in avoiding people's good intentions.”

“People like Mrs. Townsend, who are obsessed with keeping a full account of their lives, are like artists who create optical illusions. A year is a year anywhere, a day is a day for everyone, and yet with a few tricks these archivists make others believe that they have packed something into their days, something precious, enviable, everlasting, that is not available to everyone.”

“Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.”

“Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.”

“Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one's neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one's hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.”

“my chickens, with their small brains, never seem to tire of walking around, pecking, cooing, clawing. The geese are much more tranquil. They do not flap their wings at the slightest disturbance, and when they float in the pond, they stay still for so long that you know they would not mind spending the rest of their lives suspended in their watery dreams. Yet geese are never called passive.”

“Sometimes you hear people say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life […]
Some people count only what they seek as life […] What they make happen, to others and to themselves, and what they make impossible, for others and for themselves. To me, anything that happens is life.”

“What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.”

“My parents were never cruel to me. Perhaps they were too worn-out to feel much of anything […]. No one can stop you from wanting something for your children, but most of the time what you want will never be granted. Some people have to become parents themselves to truly understand that. Not me. I learned that by watching my parents.”