Laird Koenig Quotes & Sayings

One Sunday evening when it was very hot and breathlessly still we sere sitting here in this room in the dusk. He switched on the record player. Liszt. We sat. As I say, here. In this very room. We listened to the piece. Neither of us said a word. That's when he took my hand and we went out into the garden. In a quiet voice he said that I wasn't like any other person in the world and that some people wouldn't understand that. They wouldn't want me to be the way I was. They'd want to change me. They'd try to order me about and make me into the kind of person they wanted me to be. Since I was still a child there would be little I could do except stay alone, stay out of trouble, and make myself very small in the world. — Laird Koenig

How did I know how to do that to a body? Is that what you want to know?"
The boy, holding the tea tray, did not reply.
"I told you. It's exactly the same as cooking. I happen to know how to read."
"The library has stuff on things like that?"
The girl picked up the poker and pushed a maple log back into the fire. "The library has everything. — Laird Koenig

The game is pretending. It's going through the motions of life. But it's not living.

The game is for people who want rules because they're afraid to believe anything everyone else doesn't already believe. They're all scared to leave the street where they live and do something with their lives. the game is for people who want to be told what to do. Okay. Good for them, if that's what they want. — Laird Koenig

The night, a living presence, was in constant motion, shifting itself, sighing, breathing. She wondered if perhaps it, too, was trying to get warm. — Laird Koenig

Giving and taking comfort in everything they could give and take, every part of them sought to make themselves one till it was impossible for either to know the comforter from the one being comforted. — Laird Koenig

My father says most people who say they like poetry only pretend to like it.'
'I guess you like it?'
'I love it very much.' Her long hair swirled as she shook her head to correct herself. That's redundant. The word 'love' stands alone. 'Very much' only weakens it. I love words. Most people aren't very careful with them. — Laird Koenig