Beth Kephart Quotes

Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn't save you

Anna would say that she was a cat like Gemma, with nine lives to spend, all nine precious and delicious.

Fox-Trot
By the stream the fox and she-fox stood
Nose to nose beneath the stars
Dancing the music of the woods.
The deer rapped a beat with their hooves,
The ravens sang from raven hearts
As by the stream the fox and she-fox stood.
The great owl called as a great owl would,
The squirrels all shimmied in the dark,
Dancing the music of the woods.
Then from the north a fierce wind blew
And broke the starry dance apart
By the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.

I'd have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can't ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next ...

I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.
Your fiction is with you.

You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

Beauty is the worst kind of lie.

How do you know when an apology is true - when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?

When I was a boy, that was all I wanted - to grow a pair of wings and get up into the sky. I had a basement full of failed wing projects. Boards and capes and motors, even a pile of found feathers I once tried to glue together with a bottle of Elmer's; you should have seen your grandmother's face. But I never got any higher than the backyard fence I'd launch from. I never got inside a cloud. Your raven did.

I'd thought he was stars and then I'd thought he was a fox. I had thought I'd been alone, but I hadn't.

Here's another change I've noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It's what you can't see that you hope you will see, what hasn't been that might be.

You aren't happy," Estela says.
"I can't be happy," I say.
"Look at me, Kenzie."
"I'm looking at you, Estela."
"Do you know your own heart?"
"I don't know anything."
"Go," she says, "and think. And don't come back until you know.

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I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.

Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.

But listen: The weight of the camera reminds me to see. It helps me decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or newly announced. I look for water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond in winter with delirious force. If I can't see, then I don't know, and if I don't know, I'm not writing, and while some may question the value of words, or of memoir in particular, I will again make this claim: Words rendered true spook and spur us. They expect of us. They expect for us. Photographs do the same thing: "Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees," said Paul Strand.

We grow too old to lose old friends ...

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.