7 Quotes by Kathleen Alcott

If we don't talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.

Paulie smiled slightly at this, as profanity had always felt to him like a seal of understanding, a shortcut to extreme feeling that people used when they needed it most.

I had lived my life before in accordance with the poverty and itinerancy of my childhood, sliding in and out of other people’s leases, never expecting to stay very long and tolerating circumstances that strike me now as completely absurd.

Aging gracefully” was a model much talked about, though Edith doubted anyone ever felt elegant or nimble amid the nearly inescapable fatigue, the persistent mutations of once-simple tasks and the shame thereafter.

Sometimes people have a hard time looking out of themselves and need to just be alone and listen to all the conversations in their head.

In the first months without him, Edith had marveled at how many different types of quiet there could be. What had been so different about the levels of noise with him sitting in the chair, reading for hours in his drugstore glasses? Why did every shower, now, feel like such an exercise in fallacy, preparation for an event never coming, though this had always been a lone ritual?

It made him feel that waiting meant more than how it felt in the moment, that little seconds often combined and became something of weight and worth.