128 Quotes by Lydia Millet

Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity...

If you could be nothing, you could also be everything. Once my molecules had dispersed, I would be here forever. Free.

Molecules never die, I thought. Hadn’t they told us that in chemistry? Hadn’t they said a molecule of Julius Caesar’s dying breath was, statistically speaking, in every breath we took? Same with Lincoln. Or our grandparents. Molecules exchanging and mingling, on and on. Particles that had once been others and now moved through us. “Evie!” said Jack. “Look! I found a sand dollar!” That was the sad thing about my molecules: they wouldn’t remember him.

Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being. Into that gap civilization fell.

Kate Bernheimer’s fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold is an exceptional, lovely book, beautifully enigmatic, speaking a language that mysteriously evokes the unspoken.

When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born. Relatively speaking. And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store – hell no. Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.

Stay in these rooms for years and years, live on forever in a glorious museum.

He hated the American way of thought that said all things could be repaired, all things surmounted by a trick of attitude. History is trivial in this country, he said. Forgetting is the way to bliss. Ignorance is a badge of honor.

We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization’s technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other’s guts.