Quotes by Polly Horvath

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that dont, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.

You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things---a gyroscope in your heart. It doesnt seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.

I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parkss hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.

At heart, were all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.

We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We dont have to be especially good. We dont have to accomplish anything. We dont even have to be healthy.

All summers take me back to the sea. There in the long eelgrass, like birds eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, grasses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the grass waving in the wind, looking up at the blue sky. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the shore. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bathwater left in the tub after the plug has been pulled. It is the beginning of July and we have two months to live out the long, nurturing days, watching the geese and the saltwater swans and the tides as they are today, slipping out, out, out as the moon pulls the other three seasons far away wherever it takes things. Out past the planets, far away from Uranus and the edge of our solar system, into the brilliantly lit dark where the things we dont know about yet reside. Out past my childhood, out past the ghosts, out past the breakwater of the stars. Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. So summer comes to me.

And Mrs. Treaclebunny has promised to speak English from now on as well. In fact, she said when she goes to England, thats all she speaks anyway because the animals speak English there. She says anyone who has read childrens books with animals in them set in England would know that. Is The Wind in the Willows written in Mole with a little Ratty thrown in? Is Winnie-the-Pooh written in Bear? No, its English, because thats what the animals there speak. I didnt know that before. Travel is so broadening.

You cant replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but thats not to say you shouldnt get more dogs and people in your life.

Theres something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as youre playing team sports, people think youre okay.