31 Quotes by Rivka Galchen

I’ve always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions.

If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a “madman” to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the “author” might be reality and the “madman” just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.

It’s true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.

The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser’s work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be?

He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.

You’ll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you’ll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a life jacket in a train wreck.

Sometimes failing is what’s needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that’s one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It’s terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins...

He is my unicorn, though... That’s how I felt falling in love with him, as if I’d found a creature of myth.

I’m not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.