Brenda Walker Quotes & Sayings

We're at once alone and in close company: this is the great gift of the novel, the element that makes reading more than a solitary pastime. We sit within another's person. — Brenda Walker

Attraction is explained as a function of reincarnation: people who knew each other in past lives are helpless in the face of an emotion which has passed, untouched, through bodily death. Who wouldn't be? — Brenda Walker

Schopenhauer has a metaphor for human closeness. He writes about cold porcupines who have to snuggle up to keep warm, but if they snuggle too close they stab each other with their quills. A crowd of porcupines is constantly, uncomfortably assessing the safety of proximity. — Brenda Walker

In Gothic fiction, characters must contend with the dead, with active hauntings or with hallucinations of hauntings, as well as whatever other trying circumstances they might find themselves in: orphanhood, lunacy, imprisonment, inheritances that go astray, troubling romantic situations. The Gothic novel does not strive for subtlety, and it isn't to everyone's taste. It can seem adolescent, an immature version of the stately, measured, grown-up realist novel, except that the line between Gothic and the realist is never clear. A disdain for the Gothic is limiting, since this literature, in all its flagrancy, has something to say about emotional as well as physical death, and a tale of a haunting can have a narrative vitality that is far from conclusive. Gothic stories linger especially in the mind. — Brenda Walker

A good book laces invisible fingers into the shape of a winter armchair or a hammock in the sun. I'm not talking about comfort, necessarily, but support. A good writer might take you to strange and difficult places, but you're in the hands of someone you trust. — Brenda Walker

The acknowledgement of death rises and subsides in us like waves that must be ridden out. We keep our heads above this dangerous water to avoid being submerged in fear, or in hopeless resignation. — Brenda Walker

Empathy, the way that we can place ourselves, imaginatively, in the position of another person, is at the heart of what we do as readers, as people striving for a generous understanding of one another. — Brenda Walker