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" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Light
Who
Talking
Related Quotes:
" When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was. "
Elizabeth McCracken
You
Pain
Child
" Remember that a woman who has given birth to a dead child has given birth and is recovering physically, too. Don't be afraid of grieving parents. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Remember
Birth
Child
" New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Learn
Place
Name
" When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Nobody
Good
" In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Science
Green
Back
" Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Narrative
Against
Art
" A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Laugh
Curious
Look
" I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Done
Baseball
Work
" In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Real
House
Much
" There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Story
Short
Life
" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Short
Hard
Good
" In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Up
Last
Living
" It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Like
Mouth
Sword
" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Sort
Me
" I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Sound
Always
Good
" I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Dead
Story
Person
" At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Library
Job
Woman
" For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Access
Computers
Half
" I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Childhood
Best
Think
" I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Children
You
Me
" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Like
Forward
Feel
" When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Out
Map
Husband
" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Grief
Makes
Well
" I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Thoughts
Dark
I Am
" My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Parents
Family
Children
" There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.' "
Elizabeth McCracken
Baseball
Words
Saying
" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Life
Likes
" Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Sadness
Life
Wrote
" When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Powerful
Writing
" You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people. "
Elizabeth McCracken
You
Statistics
People