Quotes by Elizabeth McCracken

“truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?””

“Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.””

“but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.””

“And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.””

“Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.””

“As for me, I believe that if there's a God - and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible - then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.””

“Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't everyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? . . .Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. ””

“This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy.””

“All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.””

“I didn't know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.””

“My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.””

“The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.””

“It's a happy life and someone is missing.””

“I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on, but death goes on too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, , but the death will never disappear from view.””

“Other people's happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you're left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn't ever noticed.””