Joseph McElroy Quotes

I sat reading from first thing in the morning till the middle of the afternoon. I used to get a phone call twice a day for a while. A variety of dirty phone calls I called a Sadness Call or a Tragedy Call: I'd pick up, and all I'd hear was someone weeping.

Do you ever feel,' she wonders, 'that we fit into a large life that doesn't know us but--hold us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?

It is through each other that we can see.

Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on.

Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, you'd get in there and go so deep you'd never stop falling.

Novels are narratives to be in. To live in. To exist in. Not primarily forms to jump into and get to the end of. It's a substance that the great big novel becomes…which invites you to be in it, not necessarily to leave it. To move around in it. To move laterally.

Memory kept things from being over.

Opera's not for everyone, especially at these prices.

And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world...

... between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it--as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.

Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.

When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightening by an imbalance between earth and heaven.

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure.

You find yourself in other people.

And when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?--that's a burglar with self-respect.

Many men never locate their own truth. They're scared to wager their glistening years finding out.

People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people.

For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn't our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.

Life's in parts, and some go together and some don't, and some incongruously don't, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.

The Void is the nothing you may assume about your future.

People R Matter.

...but sovereign borders will mean Water haves and have-nots.

I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.