81 Quotes by Laura Kasischke

Scratch the surface, and there’s just more surface – chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.

There’s April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is... friendship. There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does, love.

Maybe, I think, when you’ve waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

For his birthday, she’d bought him an iPhone, which he’d returned to the store. He’d apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn’t want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone.

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you’ll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don’t display great talent and have some success right away, they won’t succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.

The veterinarian looked at Buttons for a few seconds, and then he looked up at Karen. He cleared his throat. He said, “Ma’am, I don’t know how to tell you this, but – Buttons – Buttons isn’t a dog.

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you’d crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.

Shouldn’t the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too – that moving on? Shouldn’t there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who’d been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare.