Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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