35 Quotes by Kate Bernheimer

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. – from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke.

Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation – a gnawing familiarity – that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.

I know that human triumph is never fully redemptive.

Plain and simple, I hope, in a fairy tale way: in fairy tales it is often the humble to whom magic is revealed.

As a kid, being with her was easy; it was the nearest to heaven I’ve ever been.

Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I’d feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.

The father washes his hands of his son, so the boy is forced to set out alone to try and find fear, hoping that by doing so he’ll fit in, that finally he’ll belong. That maybe once he can shudder, he’ll be able to go home. That’s a line that always got me, that part about the shudder and going home.

Because he gets scared, he becomes human. Because, my grandmother said, love makes you human. And the loss of love is pain, is fear, is sadness. The boy’s wife had hurt him. Before he had nothing to lose, and now, of course, he did.