Leslie Parry Quotes

All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot - we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising - why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It's the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what's already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell.

Her mother's private feelings, she would realize later (with no small amount of shame), were of no real concern to her. She only cared about what her mother gave to her and what she withheld.

I've found that here in this city, the lights burn ever brighter, but they cast the darkest shadows I know.

It awoke something in her, to see someone so kind and giving, so full-hearted, and yet so lost, so wretchedly bent on his own destruction. She had left home, ashamed of herself and the fury she'd caused, but now the prospect of love didn't seem like such a dangerous thing at all. He

She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.

He kept fighting. If you didn't have something to live for, he reasoned, you'd die. Not just to live for, but to live toward. He thought for a little while he'd live for someone else - a

Undergarments flapped wildly on the fire escapes above, soiled with sweat and blood: private stains, flying high over the city like crests on the flags of a ship.

Even then, only a child, she knew she had to pretend to be someone else -- for her parents, for their customers, for everyone else in that miserable factory town, dark and ashy with smoke -- even if it made her sad. If she ran fast enough on those raw, dark mornings through the woods, she might see the trees and the morning stars, merrily alive, scurry back to their rightful places. She might hear the animals whisper and sing. And she would gain something special -- a secret knowledge, an awakening. Something else no one else could know. But until then she had to pass unnoticed, waiting to be delivered to another world where she belonged.

We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns.

She had a weird, fleeting thought that she wanted to eat her sister, like a sorceress in a storybook – gobble her down into her belly, keep her safe.