Michelle Richmond Quotes

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last ... But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade ... We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.

But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

Technical speaking one is a beautiful number. One is its own factorial, its own square, its own cube. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It is the first two numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. It is the empty product. Any number raised to the zero power is one. It might be argued that one is the most independent number known to man. It can do things no other number is capable of.

Some people have a gift for making you feel okay, just by the fact of their presence.

We tend to see life as a continuum, Julie, but really, it's a series of phases, generating a series of different selves. You leave one life behind and start another. And each time, a different version of yourself emerges.

As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163

I asked her to tell me what the best moment of her life had been

Did she?

Yes, she told me about a trip the two of you had taken to Europe together right after you graduated from high school.

Pascal in Paris, it had been a dream of hers to visit Pascal's grave. On that trip she finally did. I'd never seen her so excited.

That wasn't it.

It wasn't?

No, it was in a hostel in Venice. The two of you had been travelling for a couple of weeks and all of your clothes were filthy. You didn't mind the dirty clothes very much. Lila said you were able to roll with the punches and for you, everything about the trip, even the dirty laundry, was a great adventure. But Lila liked things a certain way, and she hated being dirty. That day she had gone off in search of a laundry mat but hadn't been able to find one. You were sleeping in a room with a dozen bunks, women and men together. In the middle of the night Lila woke up and realized you weren't in your bed. She thought you must have gone to the bathroom, but after a couple minutes when you hadn't returned she became worried. She climbed down from her bunk and went to the bathroom to find you, you weren't there. She wondered up and down the hallway softly calling your name. A few of the rooms were private and had the doors closed. As she became increasingly worried she began putting her ear to those doors listening for you. Then she heard banging down below. Alarmed she wen

I understand how families become estranged, not by design, but by embarrassment. You come to a point when so much time has passed that it seems impossible to make the first move

Tragedy, in its full and life-altering form, happened to other people.

I already have a son
One is enough?
There was a time when I dreamt of having three or four but I rather failed one the fatherhood front didn't I? Some errors don't bear repeating.

Life isn't just about major characters and the big events. It's about everyone, everything, in between.