Claire Vaye Watkins Quotes & Sayings

The sooner that Layla understands that we are nothing but the sum of that which we endure, the better. — Claire Vaye Watkins

[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole. — Claire Vaye Watkins

You don't love people," he said. "You love what they do to you. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Nature had refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time wen it had not been denied them. The prospect of Mother Nature opening her legs and inviting Los Angeles back into her ripeness was, like the disks of water shimmering in the last foothill reservoirs patrolled by the National Guard, evaporating daily. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians. — Claire Vaye Watkins

In California gold was what God was in the rest of the country: everything, everywhere. — Claire Vaye Watkins

What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can't be mass marketed. — Claire Vaye Watkins

The dog wants so bad it doesn't know what it wants, — Claire Vaye Watkins

They'd drink like men, like their fathers and uncles, like George fucking Washington ... — Claire Vaye Watkins

She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home. — Claire Vaye Watkins

His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky ... The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Hoosiers aren't quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It's just you've got restlessness in your blood.' 'I don't,' she said, but he went on. 'Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That's why no one wants them now. Mojavs. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Luz, we all have an obligation to the people who love us. They've given us this gift whether we want it or not and it is our duty to stand up and be worthy. We are not loved in proportion to our deserving, and thank God for that, for unworthies like you and me would find that life a bitch. We're loved to the level we ought to rise, and even in returning it we are obligated to be gentle. — Claire Vaye Watkins

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door
every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum. — Claire Vaye Watkins

He loved her as though it had never occurred to him that he could feel otherwise. She wanted to be someone who deserved a love like that. — Claire Vaye Watkins

I love you," he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, "Don't say that." She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know. — Claire Vaye Watkins

He would, he realized, find them or spend the rest of his life looking, and this might not take so long. So be it. All he had ever needed, in that desert or this, was some say in how it went, some reassurance that he would go doing something worthwhile. A sappy idea, but not therefore false. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Now, I've made mistakes. I've lost people. But you've thrown them away. There is an important difference. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now. — Claire Vaye Watkins

The mind is a mine. So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Everyone there pretended to be so bohemian and radical but really they were all worried about offending everyone else and she was fucking sick of it. — Claire Vaye Watkins

There was always some savior out in the wilderness, some senator, some patent, some institute, some cell. — Claire Vaye Watkins

A promise unkept will take a man's mind. — Claire Vaye Watkins

What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again: purpose. — Claire Vaye Watkins

I don't know, maybe it's easier to be lost than found. At least there's energy in lostness. Something to be done. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Luz's father had had it; it was how he kept himself atop everyone around him. He believed harder in stupider things, and there was somehow authority in this. — Claire Vaye Watkins