10 Quotes by Marie-Helene Bertino

They're humble because they're in service. They know they have to practice when they are filled with love. When they are filled with bile. When the sun is out and everyone with a palpably alive soul is on the beach, they are in wood-paneled dumps, practicing. Until they ruin any chance at being substantial and there is no soul on earth who will have them.

I will have thousands upon thousands of days and this is merely one of them. This thought brings relief.

There are intimacies that don't involve marriage just as there are marriages that don't involve intimacy. The mind provides the only possible privacy so what is more intimate than thought? If intimacy is marriage, I'm married to anyone I've carried in my mind.

Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun.

Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.

If you are anything other than humbled in the presence of love, you are not in the presence of love.

Life has no past tense: To remember something is to relive it.

Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man. Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her.

They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses.