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All Quotes by author - Elizabeth McCracken
" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "
Grief
Makes
Well
" 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. "
Laugh
Curious
Look
" An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant's head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck. "
Head
Ship
Rocket
" 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. "
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. "
Access
Computers
Half
" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "
Human
Sorrow
Still
" I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line. "
Sound
Always
Good
" I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable. "
Thoughts
Dark
I Am
" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "
Even
Sort
Me
" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "
Like
Forward
Feel
" I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country. "
Self
Think
World
" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "
Light
Who
Talking
" 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. "
Children
You
Me
" I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book. "
Seeing
Through
Like
" I'm a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office. "
Person
Work
Office
" I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. "
People
Music
Single
" In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault. "
People
Unhappy
Think
" In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. "
Science
Green
Back
" 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. "
Real
House
Much
" 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. "
Up
Last
Living
" I own an e-reader, but I use it almost exclusively to read things that aren't books - student theses, unbound galleys. "
Use
Almost
Books
" I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over. "
Feel
Over
Better
" It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. "
Like
Mouth
Sword
" It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live. "
Child
Me
Know
" 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. "
Done
Baseball
Work
" 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. "
Childhood
Best
Think
" I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "
Dead
Story
Person
" I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory. "
Texas
Office
Place
" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "
Even
Life
Likes
" 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. "
Parents
Family
Children
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