20 Quotes by Ramona Ausubel

You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree?" I told her I did perfectly. "No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing a part of that tree in your own body. ... Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change.

You must have come from very far down," Alice says to the fish, "to have your own lantern.

Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.

Too long in seawater can unmake any loveliness.

The dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them.

Now that she was gone, he did not know how to stand in this room right. He looked around at the familiar faces, some people he had known for decades, and was filled with the sense of being incomplete– not enough of a person to do his job. He was paid for his mind, but at this moment he did not know how to find his mind within the shimmering sorrow of his heart. The questions he had spent his career considering seemed like kickable little stones compared to the topography of his loss.

We can do a cremation here, at the house?" I ask. "We built a fire," my father says. "Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?""There isn't a whole cat," my mother says."What is there?""Parts of cat," they say together."Bones?" I ask."Mostly. And some fur. And some face.

The only true thing is what's in front of you right now.

Inside me, the dust of a new planet began to gather.For the next forty weeks, everything made me cry, whether it was beautiful or sad, grand or meaningless. A pile of beets, a swarm of ants covering a dead bird, the falling sun turning our whole village gold--I stood there in awe, facing all of it with a pair of salt-wet eyes.