Quotes by Alison McGhee

Wouldnt want to miss a war, would I?

Your heart literally hurts when its breaking. You can feel it, every beat another ache, and nothing you can do will stop it, either from beating or breaking.

Clara Winter, he said. You are a word person and dont ever forget it.He was right. He knew. He could tell. Its something that can be sensed. Theres a difference between word-people and non-word-people.

You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.

What is the matter with these people, these people who wont stop fighting, wont stop hurting each other long enough to see that a body is a thing of beauty, is a miracle of rivers and oceans and islands and continents contained within itself? That the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each symmetrical, each perfect, each with its own system of waterways. These people of war should be shown an x-ray of an intraparenchymal hemorrhage, of a hemorrhage in an eighteen-year-old girls brain, a girl named Ivy. Take a look at that, people of war. See, you should not hurt each other, and this is why. Without you ever even trying, this is what can happen to your body, your beautiful body, and your brain, your beautiful symmetrical brain, and your heart, and your soul.

I like to read books one after another. Immerse myself in a book, and then immerse myself in the next book, and just keep going until there arent any more books left to swim in. Thats why I hate when authors die. I cannot stand it. There will be no more books forthcoming from that person. Their future books died with them. In the past I have found a series of books and loved it so much that all I wanted to do was read and read and read those books for the rest of my life. Then I would find out that the author was dead. Had in fact been dead for many a year. This has happened to me several times.

Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The worlds great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.

There comes a point at which you stop giving things up. That is what i wont give up. None of it will i give up, for my beautiful sister Ivy who lies in bed. Ivy who used to be alive. Ivy who used to be. Ivy who used. Ivy who. Ivy-who-is-not-me.Not me. Not me. Not me.

All it takes is a single moment.

I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.