6 Quotes by Joanna Ruocco

Gripping is good, thought Melba. Gripping is always good. Come what may, it helps to find an edge, a dowel, a hem. It helps to hold it, hold on to it tightly. Even if you are lying quietly, on your back, waiting for everything to pass, you still need to grasp something, with your teeth if you don't have hands, and if you don't have teeth, with your gums, and if you don't have gums...

Without the opinion of an expert there's no such thing as certainty.

I've heard that entertainment is a cure for being tired and for being wide awake as well.

Sometimes I think time must be like a kind of jelly. A jelly that makes us move slower than we would otherwise, because isn't time just a way of delaying the inevitable? If there wasn't time, everything would be over. But then I'm afraid I'm wrong. I'm afraid that, if there wasn't time, everything wouldn't have started yet, and we'd be at the beginning.

The abyss," he said hoarsely. "Everything we do, frantic activities, assignations of meaning to random gestures and grunts, succoring of our organisms and the organisms of those to whom we've developed attachments---it's all designed to distract us from the very abyss in which we formed, the formlessness that fills us. Melba, the infinite emptying of everything ... this is the only process! It doesn't matter if it's reversed. It is changeless!

After all, I was dressed in linen and so retained a certain capacity for nonchalance.