Sally Grace’s Reviews > The Chronology of Water > Status Update

“Listen I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love.
It's the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god…This book? It's for you. It's water I made a path through...Come in. The water will hold you.”

“Or is she in the heat itself, the dry whisper of wind pushing everything out and away... a woman's imagination burning a hole in her skull to get out? Did she nearly die waiting? Wanting? Is she in the sound of a southern drawl out the mouth of a woman, its dips and ahs making words go strange, beautiful?”

“It’s a small tender thing, the simplicity of loving.”

“My god. How many ways are there to love men?
It's enough to break a heart open.
The images in my head and heart. I know what they are. I do. They are a family album. It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.”

“It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.”

“The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.”

“He treated this thing I'd done - this DUI - the dead baby - the failed marriages - the rehab - the little scars at my collar bone-my vodka - my scarred as shit past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.”

“With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words.
Stretching out horizonless.”

“Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.
If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I'd be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.”

“I was not alone…some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who'd wronged us and everyone we'd been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.”