132 Quotes by Elizabeth McCracken

Engagements – they are like a prayer before eating, best quick.

People think they’re interesting. That’s their first mistake.

Blame is a compulsive behavior, the emotional version of obsessive hand washing, until all you can do is hold your palms out till your hands are full of it, and rub, and rub, and accomplish nothing at all.

Books are a bad family – there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can’t, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.

Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them – they’re on the shore and we’re on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer.

She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.

Everybody on this earth was born,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common.

You cannot fly into your own arms.

Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.