7 Quotes by Ananda Braxton-Smith

Everything turns into a story the moment it's done. The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow.

Their nasty whispering made me angry. They had a neat way of tucking their point inside something softseeming and neighborly. The cutting edge was hidden in a joke or a piece of advice. It was like being sliced by a tiny blade hidden in a goose feather; it took a moment to realize the wound.

I lay pressed into the fresh-turned ground and wondered what other unknown things lay beneath me in this sog. Black beetles I could see, heaving through the moss, and if I dug I’d find any amount of fine slough-worms. Deeper than the worms I’d find the gembugs, tiny as river-pearls and living always stuck onto spreading slime-roots, glimmering in the dark for nobody.

There are always folk in need of other folk to flesh out their own stories. They need others to join in before they can believe in anything at all. They commonly get about in crowds and ten to ganging up.

The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow.

The living turn quickly from the dead. We can sit deathwatch for a time, but at last their great absence will remind us that we are still present, and we will need to get on with being so. Life is not fussy about where it grows, but it is set on doing so.

My mother was a little wild, like all of us who live in lonely places.