20 Quotes by Marie Howe

A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.

Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story...told for the body to forget what it once loved.

--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself.

and he: (and this was almost unbearable)he saw me see him,and I saw him see me.He said something like, You're going to be ok now,or, It's been difficult hasn't it,but what he said mattered only a little.We met — in our mutual gaze — in between a third place I'd not yet been.

Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.

I liked Hell,I liked to go there alonerelieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone.The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then?I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come.Then nothing did, and no one.

Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings, someone shaking out a rug from an open window might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away and thought little or nothing of it.