Joan Wickersham Quotes & Sayings

Time and judgment collaborate to produce farce, and farce in turn contains much truth; major characters upon the stage may turn out to be lackeys in disguise, while the figures we have overlooked in the midst of the frenetic action unmask and reveal themselves as divinities. (160) — Joan Wickersham

A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork. — Joan Wickersham

[On suicide:] It's the only cause of death that can be used as a noun to describe the dead person. If you die of cancer you are not called 'a cancer.' If someone else shoots you, you are not referred to as 'a murder.' But if you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide. Your death becomes your definition. — Joan Wickersham

She knows by now that grief is about endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back. — Joan Wickersham

There is also something deeply lovely about uncertainty: the possibility of optimism. — Joan Wickersham

The word "miss" is so wistful. As is the word "wistful," for that matter. They both have sighs embedded in them, that "iss" sound. Which also sounds like if. — Joan Wickersham

Those moments of knowing are sharp and merciless, but then they fade out, like stars when the sky gets light in the morning. You know, and then you don't know. — Joan Wickersham

But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like "similar"? — Joan Wickersham

And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the slow absorption of a bruise. — Joan Wickersham

A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors.
"I will refute them with new works," he said.
It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today. (172) — Joan Wickersham