Rebecca Makkai Quotes

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story

I think that's the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.

The whole damn century would've made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.

I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.

Eddie was so controlled, so careful. His eyes, though -- the way they pulsed around the room and then back to your face -- it was as if they were taking in everything with such tremendous force, such thirst. A good chance this was the reason for his quiet. There was so much pouring in that nothing could come out.

I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be one huge blur. There's a lot that gets neglected: exercise, dishes, laundry, my poor garden. I try to prioritize the important but non-urgent things over the unimportant but urgent things.

Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.

Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust.

By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

But here at Laurelfield, there was something more in the mornings, a buzzing sensation about the whole house, as if it weren't the servants keeping it running but some other energy. As if the house had roots and leaves and was busy photosynthesizing and sending sap up and down, and the people running through were as insignificant as burrowing beetles.

Without knowing I was going to, I started to laugh, a crazy laugh like Ian's the night before, and at first he looked worried, but then he started too. Even with the wind whipping past the station, even with Ian hugging his backpack to his chest for warmth, we were laughing, and not a laughter of release or a laughter that was really sadness in disguise. It was the laugh of the absurd. Your grandmother is a seventeen-year-old boy? That creepy Russian man just paid for your ticket? Ferret-Glo?

[E]scaping is its own special brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls who didn't save themselves. ~ "The Worst You Ever Feel

Very few writers thank their mothers for keen editorial insight; I'm happy to be the exception.

I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.

You realize something once, when you are nine, and then you realize it again when you are ten, and you realize when you are eleven, twelve, but every year you see that what you thought you understood a year ago, no, wait it is ten times worse. And your heart fills up with lead.

I might be the villain of this story.

We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.

In a library in Missouri that was covered with vines
Lived thousands of books in a hundred straight lines
A boy came in at half past nine
Every Saturday, rain or shine
His book selections were clan-des-tine.

- the way a person could change, and yet you couldn't let go of your initial conception. How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger.

If there was a common thread between the great warriors and runaways of my Hulkinov ancestors, and my father the pathological expatriate, and me, it was just that: hotheaded self-righteousness. And not the bad kind, either. We actually were right. We just cared more about being right than doing what was right. And we cared more about being right than about our own lives.

And when you came here from Heaven, you left the door open so he could go out.

He started Number the Stars before we were even out of the store. "The only problem is, I already know how it ends," he said. "Because once when I looked at it back at the library, I found out."
"I do that too," I said. "It's a bad habit."
"But I never mean to." He was walking, talking, and reading all at the same time. "It's that I always have to look back and see how many pages there are, so I know when I'll be exactly halfway through, but then when I see the last page it's like my eyes suck up all the words.

There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it's true. Not that they had bad intentions, just...you always want to believe you're important in someone's life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren't.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.

I could put a book in his hands, but I couldn't take him by the ankles and dip him headfirst in another world. And for some reason, I knew even then that he needed it.

He faced the house, closed his eyes, and he put his hand on the rolled-up cuff of Asher's shirt. He wanted to bathe in it for five seconds, the future he might be having if it weren't for everything.

I hate that we have to live in the middle of history. We make enough mess on our own.

History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ "The Briefcase

It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary.

There was this tiny window where we were safer, and happier. I thought it was the beginning of something, when really it was the end.

We never let go of that,' Cecily said. 'I mean, even for parents - that's never not your baby, you know?'

"I think you're right." As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people--of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they'd ever represented, every promise.

Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.

And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone's life. Making room for someone in yours.

It's been a long time since I had a day that just cuts your life in two. Like, this hangnail on my thumb, I had it yesterday. It's the same hangnail, and I'm a completely different person.

She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.

If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.

You should know we had so much joy as well! But when you build a story down, you end up with something macabre. All stories end the same way, don't they.

The thing is," Teddy said, "the disease itself feels like a judgment. We've all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it's a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that's almost worse, it's like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn't, it's a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn't care, it's a judgment on how much you hate yourself. Isn't that why the world loves Ryan White so much? How could God have it out for some poor kid with a blood disorder? But then people are still being terrible. They're judging him for just being sick, not even for the way he got it.

Stupid men and their stupid violence. Tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick?

I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.
Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him).

We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by?" ~ "The Museum of the Dearly Departed

Maybe that's why I prefer this new library to my own bedroom: looking at the million book spines, I can imagine a million alternate endings. It turned out the butler did it all, or I ended up marrying Mr. Darcy, or we went and watched a girl ride the merry-go-round in Central Park, or we beat on against the current in our little boats, or Atticus Finch was there when we woke up in the morning.

The times I've tried not to be funny, it's never worked, and the times I'm trying not to be dark and just be funny, that never works, either. As varied as my subject matter is, I think the worldview is pretty consistent: seeing darkness and seeing humor.

She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she'd been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this.

Roman said, "When you think a specific bad thing is going to happen, it never does. I don't mean like if you think it looks like rain it won't rain, but like if you think your plane will crash, it won't."
Yale shook his head. "I want to live in your world. Doom is beautiful, and you can control your fate.

And second, everyone is so weird, but they're all completely accepted. It's like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy's made of tin, and you're a talking chicken, but what the hell, let's do a road trip.

We'd been through something our parents hadn't. The war made us older than our parents. And when you're older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who's going to show you how to live?

...but here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well, of a hopeless doomed selfish ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?

A handful of dead astronauts and Reagan weeps with the nation. Thirteen thousand dead gay men and Reagan's too busy.

On my mental instant replay, I realized that obliquely comparing his family to the Nazis was maybe not my finest moment.
He was quiet a second, and then he said, 'Did you know that Hitler anted to be an artist, but since he couldn't get into art school, he turned into a Nazi?'
'Yes, I remember that.'
'Just imagine if he got into art school, the whole world would be different.'
I said, 'It just shows that people should be allowed to be who they are. If they can't, then they turn into nasty, sad people.'
He started to laugh. 'What if you went to the art gallery, and the guy was like, "Here you see a beautiful Monet, and here on your left is an early Hitler." Wouldn't that be weird?'
I couldn't think of any subtle way to turn it back around again.
He said, 'You would go to the gift shop and buy Hitler postcards, and you'd go, "Oh, look at this beautiful Hitler. I'm going to hang it in my room!" And people would wear Hitler t-shirts.'
'Yes,' I said. 'That would have been better.

I no longer believe I can save people. I've tried, and I've failed, and while I'm sure there are people out there in the world with that particular gift, I'm not one of them ... But books, on the other hand: I do still believe that books can save you.

With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn't it?