Important Quotations Explained
1. She loves the world for being
rude and indestructible, and she knows that other people must love
it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically
of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter
how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even when we're further gone
than Richard; even if we're fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting
in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live.
2. Even if the door to the trailer
had opened, the woman inside, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave
or even Susan Sarandon, would have been simply that, a woman in
a trailer, and you could not possibly have done what you wanted
to do. You could not have received her, there on the street; taken
her in your arms, and wept with her. It would be so wonderful to
cry like that, in the arms of a woman who was at once immortal and
a tired, frightened person just emerged from a trailer.
3. She can feel the nearness of
the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be
utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again. The
devil is a headache; the devil is a voice inside a wall; the devil
is a fin breaking through dark waves. The devil is a brief, twittering
nothing that is a thrush's life. The devil sucks all the beauty
from the world, all the hope, and what remains when the devil has finished
is a realm of the living dead—joyless, suffocating.
4. What I wanted to do seemed simple.
I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could
stand beside a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning.
Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.
5. Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time
for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families
to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not
change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts,
our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and
then we sleep—it's as simple and ordinary as that.
