Carolyn Parkhurst Quotes & Sayings

It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day. — Carolyn Parkhurst

All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. — Carolyn Parkhurst

There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay. — Carolyn Parkhurst

How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago? It's the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood. The shameful squeeze of it. — Carolyn Parkhurst

For so long, it was just my secret. It burned inside me, and I felt like I was carrying something important, something that made me who I was and made me different from everybody else. I took it with me everywhere, and there was never a moment when I wasn't aware of it. It was like I was totally awake, like I could feel every nerve ending in my body. Sometimes my skin would almost hurt from the force of it, that's how strong it was. Like my whole body was buzzing or something. I felt almost, I don't know, noble, like a medieval knight or something, carrying this secret love around with me. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Life is never what you expect it to be. Sex has more to do with salt than sweetness. The sky is white as often as it's blue. — Carolyn Parkhurst

The simplest thing that can be said about any person, any relationship, is that it's not simple at all. — Carolyn Parkhurst

It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air. I was saying something that was making her laugh, and I couldn't stop looking at her. It was a little bit chilly, and her cheeks were pink, and her dark hair was flowing around her face. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. Sometimes our arms brushed against each other as we walked, and it was like I could feel the touch for minutes after it happened. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I've always known that the best part of writing occurs before you've picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind, its potential is infinite; it's only when you start pinning words to paper that it becomes less than perfect. You have to make your choices, set your limits. Start whittling away at the cosmos, and don't stop until you've narrowed it down to a single, ordinary speck of dirt. And in the end, what you've made is not nearly as glorious as what you've thrown away. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Washing the Dead is an illuminating and intricately layered novel about the complicated legacies that pass from mother to daughter, and about the ways that understanding our own history helps make us who we are. Michelle Brafman is an insightful writer who never falters or flinches in her quest to uncover the hearts of her characters. — Carolyn Parkhurst

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together. — Carolyn Parkhurst

There's no book that absolutely everyone loves. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I have heard that sometimes when a person has an operation to transplant someone else's heart or liver or kidney into his body, his tastes in foods change, or his favorite colors, as if the organ has brought with it some memory of its life before, as if it holds within it a whole past that must find a place within its new host. This is the way I carry Lexy inside me. Since the moment she took up residency within me, she has lent her own color to the way I see and hear and taste, so that by now I can barely distinguish between the world as it seemed before and the way it seems now. I cannot say what air tasted like before I knew her or how the city smelled as I walked its streets at night. I have only one tongue in my head and one pair of eyes, and I stopped being able to trust them a long time ago. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I'm not going to feel guilty for wanting the things that everyone wants. — Carolyn Parkhurst

What's it like, Lexy? You wake up and you feel - what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of the flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces inside you have been rubbed raw. A voice in your head - no, not voices, not like hearing voices, nothing that crazy, just your own inner voice, the one that says 'Turn left at the corner' or 'Don't forget to stop at the post office,' only now it's saying, 'I hate myself.' It's saying, 'I want to die.' — Carolyn Parkhurst

Because for most of us, suicide is a moment we'll never choose. It's only for people like Lexy, who know they might choose eventually, who believe they have a choice to make. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I can't take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Imagine that your child is born with wings. — Carolyn Parkhurst

This is happening; this is not fiction. And the thing about life? It doesn't have texture at all. Go ahead, feel the space around you. Do it now. See? It's nothing but air. — Carolyn Parkhurst

There's a startling fact that you read somewhere: after airbags became standard in cars, statisticians noticed that the incidence of severe leg injuries increased dramatically. Think about it for a minute: Why should that be? Is there something about the way airbags inflate during collision that targets the passengers' legs, makes them more vulnerable? No. It's a matter of checks and balances. Before airbags, there were certain accidents that would have killed you; you'd be a corpse in the morgue, and no one would be paying any attention to your legs. When we change the way we do things - the way we shop for groceries or take care of our children or protect ourselves from harm - we set other changes in motion, for good or for ill. And it may be years before we figure out what we've done. — Carolyn Parkhurst

You are my finest knight — Carolyn Parkhurst

It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Happiness, as it exists in the wild - as opposed to those artificially constructed moments like weddings and birthday parties, where it's gathered into careful piles - is not smooth. Happiness in the real world is mostly just resilience and a willingness to arch oneself toward optimism. To believe that people are more good than bad. To believe that the waves carrying you are neither friendly nor malicious, and to know that you're less likely to drown if you stop struggling against them. — Carolyn Parkhurst

It's gratifying to know that you've appeared in someone else's dreams. It's proof that you exist, in a way, proof that you have substance and value outside the walls of your own mind. — Carolyn Parkhurst

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Sometimes I wonder how we can be so sure what it is God sees. How arrogant we are, I sometimes think, to imagine there's someone watching us every minute. To think our every action matters that much. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him.This is the true beginning. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in her hand, and I remember her turning away from me in anger, her body stiff as a stone. I remember the sound of her breath as she slept. I remember the way her body felt in my arms. I remember, always I remember, that she brought solace to my life as well as grief. That for every dark moment we shared between us, there was a moment of such brightness I almost could not bear to look at it head-on. I try to remember the woman she was and not the woman I have built out of spare parts to comfort me in my mourning. And I find, more and more, as the days go by and the balm of my forgiveness washes over the cracked and parched surface of my heart, I find that remembering her as she was is a gift I can give us both. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it ... Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all. — Carolyn Parkhurst