Claire Vaye Watkins Quotes

Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know.

You don't love people," he said. "You love what they do to you.

There was always some savior out in the wilderness, some senator, some patent, some institute, some cell.

He would, he realized, find them or spend the rest of his life looking, and this might not take so long. So be it. All he had ever needed, in that desert or this, was some say in how it went, some reassurance that he would go doing something worthwhile. A sappy idea, but not therefore false.

Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians.

A promise unkept will take a man's mind.

Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.

Luz's father had had it; it was how he kept himself atop everyone around him. He believed harder in stupider things, and there was somehow authority in this.

Hoosiers aren't quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It's just you've got restlessness in your blood.' 'I don't,' she said, but he went on. 'Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That's why no one wants them now. Mojavs.

What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can't be mass marketed.

He loved her as though it had never occurred to him that he could feel otherwise. She wanted to be someone who deserved a love like that.

Everyone there pretended to be so bohemian and radical but really they were all worried about offending everyone else and she was fucking sick of it.

The dog wants so bad it doesn't know what it wants,

They'd drink like men, like their fathers and uncles, like George fucking Washington ...

Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.

Nature had refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time wen it had not been denied them. The prospect of Mother Nature opening her legs and inviting Los Angeles back into her ripeness was, like the disks of water shimmering in the last foothill reservoirs patrolled by the National Guard, evaporating daily.

[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.

The sooner that Layla understands that we are nothing but the sum of that which we endure, the better.

I don't know, maybe it's easier to be lost than found. At least there's energy in lostness. Something to be done.

Now, I've made mistakes. I've lost people. But you've thrown them away. There is an important difference.

The mind is a mine. So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out.

One way to say all this is, Our mother was an addict and she overdosed.

Another way is, Our mother was suicidal and she killed herself.

Another way is, Our mother was poor and ignored and dismissed for years by doctors who put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin, which eventually killed her.

Another way is, Our mother needed help and no one, including us, gave it to her.

What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again: purpose.