Nile Shadows

penchant for order and proper hygiene

we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound and stab us …We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us

Great fiction is hard to sell. What happens to a person who reads a book—if it’s any good—is a profoundly private and irrational process, and the more distinctive the novel, the more private and irrational the process. That’s where the trouble with publishing begins.

defy the law of averages

The one truly dreadful thing is when people no longer have the faith to go on, when it seems to no longer matter whether they survive or not because nothing they can do is worthwhile and no one cares. And that’s when the smallest thing can make all the difference.

So often the world seems such a dark and unyielding place that anything that stills the whispers inside seems to have its uses, even when you know it’s a false quiet.

Of course we do move on all right, but we don’t forget nor should we, and nothing important is ever left behind, and no one we’ve loved ever goes out of our lives. They live on in other ways, that’s all, in our words and our gestures, changing us and changing with us and even speaking to us in the quiet moments. Sometimes recognized, mostly not, but always a part of us, woven into the stuff of our lives.

People have a way of slipping into our hearts and staying there, and we treasure them and don’t want to let them go, and more than that, we never can let them go.

wrenched with pain

perverse sense of humor