Shirley Ann Grau Quotes

At the end of a marriage it is difficult to recall the beginning.

And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn't matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone. And the worst part was that you didn't know exactly at what point it disappeared. There was nothing you could point to and say: now, there. One day you saw that it was missing and had been missing for a long time. It wasn't even anything to grieve over, it had been such a long time passing. The glitter and hush-breath quality just slipped away...there isn't even a scene--not for me, nothing so definite--just the seepage, the worms of time...I look at my children now and I think: how long before they slip away, before I am disappointed in them.

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

One of my current pet theories is that the winter is a kind of evangelist, more subtle than Billy Graham, of course, but of the same stuff.

Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every
person has a ring of stories around them, a halo almost.
People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl
squatting in the front dooryard, in mud-caked overalls,
digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and
talked to me. some I've forgotten, but most I remember.
And so my memory goes back before my birth

Me? What am I? Nothing. The legs on which dinner comes to the table, the arms by which cocktails enter the living room, the hands that drive cars. I am the eyes that see nothing, the ears that don't hear. I'm invisible too. They look and don't see me. When they move, I have to guess their direction and get myself out of the way.

Haven't you ever noticed how highways always get beautiful near the state capital?

Some people you can't comfort. You can only go along with their pretending and pretend yourself.

Oak trees come out of acorns, no matter how unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree's way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through. One life for another.