81 Quotes by Laura Kasischke

It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond,and a tiny goldfish swimminglike an animated change-pursemade of brightness and surprisesobserving the moment through its empty eye.

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free.

The last hour waiting patiently on a tray for her somewhere in the future. The spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.

The aunts gathered around the fiery cake chanting, Make a wish! Make a wish!

A man holding a woman made of bad moods in his arms.

Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.

Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known- their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth. A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.

And I still walk the sidewalk mumblingsomething about how it will all be fineFine is its own crazy village on the RhineFine is the name of the cuckoo-clock makerFine is the word the cuckoo criesevery hour after hour on the hour—scrambling out of its dark little holelike something being chased with a knife by Time

When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.