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" 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. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Feel
Over
Better
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" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "
Elizabeth McCracken
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Sorrow
Still
" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Like
Forward
Feel
" Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Stuff
See
How
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Self
Think
World
" When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Back
College
Poetry
" 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
" 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. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Head
Ship
Rocket
" 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
" Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Look
Writing
Blessing
" 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
" There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Loved
Working
Library
" Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Writing
Story
Short
" 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
" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Life
Likes
" Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Number
Half
First
" The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Brick
Walls
Over
" 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
" 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
" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Short
Hard
Good
" 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 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. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Unhappy
Think
" You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.' "
Elizabeth McCracken
Humor
Writing
You
" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Grief
Makes
Well
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Seeing
Through
Like
" 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