10 Quotes by Pamela Erens

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother’s deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn’t tell, or told stories that weren’t entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form.

In the spring and summer I watched my plants flower, but it was, perhaps, in winter that I loved them best, when their skeletons were exposed. Then I felt they had more to say to me, were not simply dressing themselves for the crowds. Stripped of their leaves, their identities showed forth stark, essential.

Her mother’s quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline’s despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live.

Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.

In my experience, cutting back is the crucial act that allows the vitality, precision and emotional heart of a piece of writing to emerge.

They grabbed a woman held in Death’s grasp and shook and shook and forced Death to drop her.

But the moan this time is not simply a moan of will and pain but a call into the emptiness: Is anyone there? There is a blackness spreading into her vision and she feels herself spinning in an unlit sky. Empty, empty, her moan cries. The moan goes on, spiraling deeper into space, and at the end of it Lore falls directly into sleep, with no sense of transition, into a dream of gray waters, of swimming with weary arms and trying to spy the shore.

But she let him stay that one time. Fatigue from fighting him, maybe. Maybe the sense of loneliness when the man’s body withdrew so quickly, and you felt the cold between your legs and the abrupt sense of separateness again.

The external world disappears; all she hears is her own sound; she is a cave filled with a great echoing voice. When she is done she closes her eyes for a moment, returning to herself.