Laura Kasischke Quotes & Sayings

But I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him ... It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper-"You will inherit a million dollars," "You will go on an exotic vacation"-but never moving, standing in one place while the damp batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed. — Laura Kasischke

Behind him there's still the mirror ... a bit of infinity, which in its disinterest still holds their reflections safely in it. — Laura Kasischke

Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. — Laura Kasischke

--Your headache--


I am trying to imagine it
Your head is in your hands
The nurse is pouring pills onto a plate
November again
Too late

Your headache
It is a bird
Wounded, in leaves

Its sweet bird's nest is full of pain in a distant place

November
There are daisies
In the ruined garden, still blooming strangely

And in a manic yellow hat, the old lady

And the old man, dead in his bed

And their daughter, the saint:

Her dark, religious hair gets tangled in the branches
She is screaming, grabbing

While the nurses play Mozart in another room
While the bats fly over the roof
Snatch the black notes from the blackness
Laughing

You cry
I am going to die

I can see them through this window

Their little black capes

The touching ugliness of their little faces — Laura Kasischke

We can talk to one another on telephones
in banks, in cars, in line. No more
sitting on the floor
attached to a cord
while everybody listens.
No more
standing outside the booth
in the cold, fingering
an adulterous dime. We

send each other mail without stamps.
Watch television without antennas.
Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never
on a bus, never
in the lobby while we're waiting
for the lawyer to call on us.

Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon.
Quaintly the record album's scratch and spin.
Our groceries, scanned.
Pump our own gas.
Take off our shoes
before boarding our plane.
Those towers: Gone. And Pluto's
no longer a planet:
Forget it.
I could go on

and on, but you're still dead
and nothing's any different. — Laura Kasischke

A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire. — Laura Kasischke

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you'd crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church. — Laura Kasischke

The first shot causes warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain ... a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is. — Laura Kasischke

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger. — Laura Kasischke

Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could life the lid and precious gems would spill over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy- an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter. — Laura Kasischke

That's right," Holly had said. "I bet there were, but I bet they didn't work as well as a plastic bag," and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets. — Laura Kasischke

There's April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is ... friendship. There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does, love. — Laura Kasischke

If
you sing a sad song loud enough, the boys
on those torpedo boats
can hear you under the sea. — Laura Kasischke

Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known- their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth. A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long. — Laura Kasischke

For his birthday, she'd bought him an iPhone, which he'd returned to the store. He'd apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn't want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone. — Laura Kasischke

Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, "My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too." I imagined Phil's mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil's food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich. Another time he said, regarding his father's late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn't help, it would just make the checks even later. "It's a vicious circus," Phil said. When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation - the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling - might help, he said, "I'm virtuously certain it wouldn't," looking martyred and older than his years. — Laura Kasischke

But the future bores me.
I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.
I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal. — Laura Kasischke

He felt certain that if she'd have let him, he could have levitated with her in his arms and they could have made love on the ceiling. He could have unzipped his body and wrapped her in his skin. He could have buried himself in her neck and slipped into the place between her shoulder and her throat, and been soldered by passion to her forever. — Laura Kasischke

Shouldn't the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too - that moving on? Shouldn't there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who'd been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare — Laura Kasischke

When it comes to nothingness, there is no cup. — Laura Kasischke

She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily. The hall light shone in my eyes. There was a halo in her hair. It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head. — Laura Kasischke

The veterinarian looked at Buttons for a few seconds, and then he looked up at Karen. He cleared his throat. He said, Ma'am, I don't know how to tell you this, but - Buttons - Buttons isn't a dog. — Laura Kasischke

She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space- all meteors, no atmosphere. — Laura Kasischke

I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I'd never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them- something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light, and it was thought I could hold the life force itself in my hands. — Laura Kasischke

Sometimes he'd write my mother's new name under his on a scrap of paper ... then, the one that hurt her teeth to see, Mrs. Brock Connors-as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her. — Laura Kasischke

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love. — Laura Kasischke

And, for the first few months after her surgeries, Holly had felt, horribly, as if she'd been turned into a machine, an unkillable robot. She had terrible dreams in which she was searching for her body parts on shelves lined with thousands of other body parts, floating in thousands of jars. In the dreams, Holly was convinced that her soul had been located in one of those body parts, and now her soul was trapped for eternity in formaldehyde and glass. — Laura Kasischke

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon- pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance- and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone. — Laura Kasischke

It's impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed. — Laura Kasischke

We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man. — Laura Kasischke

The weatherman is always as honest as he is vague. — Laura Kasischke

Something wild was going on in that coffin ... .I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers. — Laura Kasischke

Mr. McCleod: And if there's anything I want you guys to take with you from this class, as you're abusing your bodies over break, is three things: the heart is the body's strongest muscle, that the brain has more cells in it than our galaxy has stars, and that the body is 72% water. So wherever you go over vacation, don't get too dehydrated. — Laura Kasischke

Maybe, I think, when you've waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses. — Laura Kasischke

Home"

It would take forever to get there
but I would know it anywhere:

My white horse grazing in my blossomy field.
Its soft nostrils. The petals
falling from the trees into the stream.

The festival would be about to begin
in the dusky village in the distance. The doe
frozen at the edge of the grove:

She leaps. She vanishes. My face -
She has taken it. And my name -

(Although the plaintive lark in the tall
grass continues to say and to say it.)

Yes. This is the place.
Where my shining treasure has been waiting.
Where my shadow washes itself in my fountain.

A few graves among the roses. Some moss
on those. An ancient

bell in a steeple down the road
making no sound at all
as the monk pulls and pulls on the rope. — Laura Kasischke

Your life can change in an instant. that instant can last forever. — Laura Kasischke

An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident- opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall- the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the grounder in small, cold shards. It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived. — Laura Kasischke

The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It's like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh. — Laura Kasischke

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face. — Laura Kasischke

But, perhaps, I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air- looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged. I could smell the death between them. — Laura Kasischke

My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees. — Laura Kasischke

The first time I had sex with a man for money, it was September. — Laura Kasischke

Scratch the surface, and there's just more surface - chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get. — Laura Kasischke

No one is going to hear what she says whether she speaks or not. Simply she could close her eyes and never speak again. She could suck all of the air in this room-every dust mote, every atom-into her body and hide it inside her ... — Laura Kasischke

The blond stuffs her hairbrush, which is now spun with gold and black silk (a miniature angel's nest) back into her backpack next to her anthology of English literature. The pages are so thin, they're like dead girls' dreams, translucent skin. On them it seems that everything that has ever been thought has been written. — Laura Kasischke

Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren't accompanied by regret. — Laura Kasischke

Being female was so hard. Always having to rearrange yourself, to pluck yourself and whittle yourself and deprive yourself and inspect yourself in order to feel comfortable in this world. — Laura Kasischke

Backs. Followed by the traditional Burning of the Gifts. Everyone would gather to watch the toaster and blender explode. Followed by the sacrificial drowning of a bridesmaid, the one who'd caught the fucking bouquet? — Laura Kasischke