8 Quotes by Kate Inglis

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the loss of bodily presence and the gain of ghost messages. It's misplaced outrage and well-placed courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye. Stories hinge there, swinging this way and that.

When you've got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I'd write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the last sentence trailing off like eeeeeejjjjjjjjjjjjj . . . Then I'd finally crawl to bed. Mornings were rough, but I got used to it. It was invigorating to write a couple thousand words while the rest of the world was asleep. More invigorating than rest.

There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.

You will never be yourself again. Not in the way you think of “yourself” as a concept. You will always long for what you have lost. But you will also be countless other things you don’t know about yet.

Forgive people for not knowing what to say, for filling the vacuum with every wrong thing. The quicker you realize most humans are artless thugs when faced with someone else's grief, the quicker you'll get over it when you meet one.

The windshield wipers are pushed up so they won't freeze to the glass and a robin just landed on the tip of one, staring beady-eyed at what we both hope is the great giving-up. The field freezes and unfreezes. It's snowing but it's a spineless snow, sugar on top of defrosted mud. There's life under there. The robin took off and the wiper blade twanged like a plucked string.Everything's coming alive.

Humility is in not telling other people what to do but in supporting others as they determine what they should do for themselves.

Grief is not an illness, a diagnosis, or a constant state. Grief is the bruise after a blow. Blackening is normal. Swelling is normal. Then a rotten sort of putrid. Then it sinks beneath the skin, failing to mark you anymore, failing to excuse you, returning you to the masses before you’re ready. You’ll miss the black and blue because as soon as it fades, you go from “honoring” to – as your onlookers might say – “dwelling,” that damnable word.